True confession: One of the greatest appeals of animated GIFs for me is part of a science fiction fantasy. My notebooks contain many attempts at writing a story about digital anthropology graduate students of the future whose task it is to decipher the bits and bytes of information left behind by earlier generations. I like to imagine that there is specialty field within this future discipline that looks specifically at animated GIFs for clues about a particular civilization’s whose cultural record is otherwise inscrutable.

Would these little silent moving miniatures assume the status of the cave paintings in Lascaux, Egyptian heiroglyphics, or Andean Quipus as an entry point into interrogating the earlier times for these scholars? Well certainly for the sake of the radio play I hope to write this would have to happen. And then a fun story arc to imagine is how our grad student would deal with the discovery of a dusty old hard drive full of ds106 animated GIFS? What would she make of a Slide Guy whooshing down a water slide?

I suppose my purpose in beginning this post with this true confession is to provide a bit of explanation as to what animates my interest in these little curios.

Shifting gears: When I woke up this morning I had a sudden recollection of another moment in Paths of Glory that struck me as being good for an animated GIF. This time it’s Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax as he emerges from 701st regiments bunker to lead the charge to retake the anthill from the Germans. The battlefield sequence that follows, shot with handheld camera in a documentary style, is electrifying.

It seems that what I look for in a possible clip for an animated GIF is an isolated brief motion that stands out in some way. The idea of standing out is fuzzy and too subjective. I think what has happened is that I’ve gradually developed an eye for such moments when watching moving pictures. I wonder if others have had the experience of a film scene saying “GIF me” while viewing.

Another Angle: The sequence of Colonel Dax waving his pistol in the direction of the charge lasted less than two seconds. I set the capture rate at 4 frames per second (as opposed to 8 fps for yesterday’s Tavern scene). As there were only five frames captured and too much background movement, there was no cause to use layer masking to reduce the file size. Besides the exploding shell and flying debris are essential to the scene.

The size of this five frame file is 586 kb. The final step of creating an animated GIF in GIMP is to provide the delay rate. This refers to how long each frame is delayed before going to the next one. The default setting is 100 milliseconds (ms). This usually results in a playback rate that is too fast for my liking. I used 140 ms for this one and for the tavern scene. The delay rate is an important variable in determining how realistic the motion in the animated GIF is. I believe it is in some ways affected by the original capture rate from mpeg stream clip.

Though I’ve yet to confirm it, I believe that a clip captured at 4 fps will play back at a different rate than one captured at 8 fps even when an identical delay rate. This is a hypothesis I will need to confirm. If nothing else, I hope the experiment provides interesting data for future digital anthropologists and other scholars.