While getting ready to make my way for the airport on my final day in Japan, it seems there’s just time enough for one more animated GIF. The clip above is from an elaborate song and dance number from W.C. Fields’ International House. The musical number, from which this post draws its title, takes place in the ballroom of a hotel in Wuhu, China where very curious things are going down. This 1933 Paramount Pictures’ film is another one I must see when I’m back in the states.

I put the animated GIF together last week but have been too busy pulling everything together for today’s departure that there wasn’t time to get it posted. I did however have time to watch an amazing 11 minute clip from International House on the YouTube. Though I’ve never been much of a W.C. Fields fan, I’m feeling an odd desire to further explore his career as I become more interested in old Hollywood. I’m also eager to see performances by several other Hollywood legends who appear in International house such as Franklin Pangborn, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Rudy Vallee, and Bela Lugosi.

My favorite sequence from the YouTube clip is the dialog between Fields and the hotel nurse Gracie Allen. Though not shown in the clip, Allen’s husband George Burns played the hotel doctor. It is an absurd conversation in which the dingy and naive ALlen clearly gets the better of the surly drunkard. After she walks away Fields delivers a flabbergasted line that totally kills me, “The wren’s cuckoo.”

I’d hoped to be able to say more about why I find this film so intriguing but I really have to get my show on the road. Hopefully, I’ll be abe to find a DVD of in the states and post a review at some point – or at least some more animated GIFs.

Recent excursions into Hollywood and pop-culture history have made me realize that there’s a lot of awesome stuff out there that I’d never even knew existed. When I leave Japan next week for a few weeks of R & R before heading to the next chapter, I plan on looking up for some recently discovered films. On the top of my list is Story Weather from which the Nicholas Brothers animated GIF above was captured.

The 6 minute YouTube clip from which 15 frames of a dynamic three second sequence were extracted also features electrifying performances by Cab Calloway and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. According to wikipedia, this 1943 20th Century Fox film featuring an African-American cast is considered one of Hollywood’s best musicals. The wikipedia entry also says that the film was included in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2001.

As I mentioned in a recent podcast, as much as I’d like to learn to dance, it’s a wee bit too late in the game for me. But someday some youngster might come across an animated GIF like the Nicholas Brothers’ Jumping Jive and be inspired to learn how to make such awesome art as they did in the olden days.

I continue to slowly work my way through the four plus hour Northwest Passage fanedit version of Twin Peaks in search of GIF-able sequences. The GIFed scene above is from Dr. Jacoby leaves Conference Room A after a curious conversation with Special Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman and occurs at the two hour mark.

I’m enjoying the combined experience of revisiting these awesome moments of a remarkable TV program while honing my animated GIF assembly skills. It’s kind of a win-win situation. Though there have also been some frustrating moments such as with the image above.

The sequence I originally selected for this loop was 12 frames and included Dr. Jacoby delivering my favorite line from the entire series: “Hang loose haoles.” Jacoby’s gesture and facial expresson looped seamlessly. The only problem was that a slow camera drifting movement caused way too big of a jump between the first and final frame.

The four frames from the GIF above also loop the foreground motion without much seam. But there remains a small version of the background jump.

My preference would be to have Jacoby’s motion isolated against a static background. I’ve gradually been figuring out how to assemble such a background. The Bolger, Hamlisch, and Crosby GIF was my first experiment with this. It is a fairly straight forward process but is also time consuming.

Time permitting, I’ll try to use that same process on some of the Twin Peaks scenes I’ve passed by because of too much background motion.

Just before shooting this electrifying glance at a breakfasting Agent Cooper, young Audrey Horne delivered this priceless line,

Sometimes I get so flushed, it’s interesting. Do your palms ever itch?

One of my main goals in assembling animated GIFs is to make the loop appear as seamless as possible. To do that in this scene of Agent Cooper after he retrieved a foreign object from beneath Laura Palmer’s fingernail, it was necessary to use layer masking to isolate a single frame of his magnifying glass because the small amount of movement during the two second clip left an undesirable jump.

Because this GIF contains 16 frames with such minimal masking, the file size is 705 kb. Three parameters could have been tweaked to have made the file size smaller. One would have been to have captured fewer frames through either a lower capture rate or shorter clip length. Another would have been to crop some of the original image. The image could also have been rescaled to smaller image size proportions. Done individually or in combination, any of the tweaks above would have significantly lowered the overall impact and quality of the image. This is why I’m less concerned with file size on this recent series of Twin Peaks GIFs than I was with earlier experiments.

I still haven’t tried to manually optimize the colors as was suggested by Mark a while back. But I’m inclined to believe the GIMP does this automatically.

I think I’m going to keep working on this for a while. I’m not sure if there is any grand scheme to recent efforts. As long as it remains fun and brings such personal satisfaction, I see no reason to stop.

As mentioned in an earlier tutorial on assembling animated GIFs, I use MPEG StreamClip to select the clip’s start and end points. The selection is then trimmed and the frames are exported as individual png files. It is these individual image files that are then opened as layers in GIMP and then saved as the silent animated GIF file.

I rarely pay attention to the sound and dialog from the film while going about my process. But while working on this clip from the videotape that was found in Laura Palmer’s room, I couldn’t help but notice the line Agent Cooper said to Bobby Briggs durring Bobby’s questioning at the police station over Laura’s murder. This is one instance I wish it were possible to keep the audio linked to the animated GIF file.

Does anyone know if this is even possible?

Watching the four plus hour Northwest Passage fanedit of Twin Peaks brought back a bunch of memories. The video claims to be distillation of the mystery surrounding Laura Palmer’s murder. I suppose it works on that level but frankly, I was never much interested in the plot line of David Lynch’s television masterpiece.

I watched it week after week for two years because it was the weirdest and most beautiful thing I’d ever seen on the tube.

I suppose the Northwest Passage fanedit provides a convenient way to either dive-in to or brush up on Twin Peaks. And it also contains several moments that can be turned into animated GIFs for those of us still trying to hone the skills.

It was the chance discovery of a sixty-year-old radio show while researching for the last podcast that led me to discover these clips of Ray Bolger dancing with a couple of dead presidents. At the end of Ray Bolger’s segment on the Doris Day Radio Show he says that he will see her on the set the next day as he leaves the stage. A little bit of Googling revealed that he was referring to the 1952 Warner Brothers’ musical April in Paris. Until this week, it was a movie I’d never heard of or knew nothing about. But thanks to YouTube and the web, I’ve got enough material for a series of some fun animated GIFs. As mentioned in earlier posts, I continue to find myself always on the lookout for suitable moments to put in to perpetual loop back.

For me, discovering the the process of putting these things together has been an unexpected treat. Looking back and learning about Hollywood legends such as Stanley Kubrick, Jimmy Durante, Kirk Douglas, Judy Garland, Timothy Carey, Eleanor Powell, Ray Bolger and Doris Day allows me to imagine life and circumstances in an era in America that seems more and more illusory.

Speaking of illusion, how about the idea of a low-level State Department official dancing and singing about being in love as portraits of Presidents Washington and Lincoln come to life and begin hoofing along. Sure it’s light fare, but it’s also a lot of fun.

One disheartening realization in looking back at the entertainment and talent of this era is that I need to reexamine my recent dream to reinvent myself as a song and dance man. Fortunately there’s enough inspiration on offer via the web that this illusion too just might be possible.

I watched many Ray Bolger clips on YouTube while doing research for the last podcast. Several amazing scenes of him dancing have been downloaded and are in the queue to be assembled into animated GIF form. But when I came across Ray’s 1963 appearance on CBS’s The Judy Garland Show, I felt I’d struck gold.

The visual moment I love most, pictured above, comes as Judy asks Ray to sing If I Only Had a Brain. This was his signature song from his role as Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. Thirty years prior to this television show is when each of them performed the parts that would, for better or worse, define each of their subsequent careers.

But the most powerful moments in the video are spoken words which obviously don’t lend themselves to animated GIF form. Once such moment was when Ray described the deeper significance of the Oz story as told to him by his mother when he was a boy. The other is Ray recalling how much working with Judy on the movie had meant to him. It’s the sort of nostalgia that could bring a tear to the eye and is very much worth watching.

But there are still a couple more GIFs that might be of interest:

Here’s an extracted moment of Ray singing If I Only Had a Brain. The warmth and affection in Judy’s expression, even if she’s only mugging for the camera, is striking. And given everything else that goes down in the video, I’m of a mind that we are seeing genuine emotion here.

Technically speaking, there’s a bit more jumpiness in this GIF than I’d prefer. In my effort to find beginning and ending points in which the faces, bodies, motions and camera angles coincided, I failed to notice that there was an ever so small camera movement.  That’s why I cropped this image instead of changing the scale as I did with the other two GIFs.

The first two clips were longer sequences than I’ve been capturing lately – each was over than three seconds. Even with a capture rate of  4 fps, I still wound up with over a dozen frames for each GIF. This means that the files sizes are larger than I’d ordinarily prefer.

The same is not true of the final GIF of this series.

The video ends with Ray and Judy doing Follow the Yellow Brick  Road. It speaks for itself, doesn’t it?