For those of you who’ve left Second Life or never yet experienced it, an upcoming event might be a good way to get a sense of the current state of the this virtual world. SL98 is the name for Second Life’s ninth birthday celebration and is scheduled to run from June 18 – June 27.
I’ve never experienced one of these but hope to do so this time around. According to the SL9B blog, there are opportunities for exhibitors and volunteers in the SL community to participate. If I get my act together quick enough, I might be able set up an animated GIF exhibition.
The video below is part of a daily series of informative SL9B Public Service Announcements from Crap Mariner‘s crew:
After several attempts over the past few days, I feel I’m finally getting a sense of how to make animated GIFs that have smooth looping motion with an economical files size. This jumping GIF was pulled from a four second video capture at 4 frames per second. From the 16 frames that were created, only eight were used. I’ve discovered that an even number of frames will make turning the GIF into a texture file to be taken back in to Second Life is preferable. Incidently, using GIMP, I’ve set the delay rate between frames at 280 milliseconds.
Now that I’m getting a better handle on this process, I hope to be able to write up a useful tutorial with screen captures later this week.
Jim mentioned in Flickr comments for today’s daily create that my offering appeared to be more Second Life stuff imagery. The image of the face that I traced is actually from some old comic strip.
Jim’s comment was just the spark needed to put this video together.
I’m curious what people will make of this weirdness.
In the quest to bring animated GIFs into Second Life, I decided to turn a clip from my recent machinima into a GIF with the hope of being able to bring it back in to Second Life as a texture file.
Earlier I mentioned an idea to create a gallery or museum devoted to the animated GIF. The idea was to use Peregrine’s nifty web-based texture creator to generate the files and scripts. But I quickly realized that it would reject most GIF files for being too large (though I don’t know if that is based on file size or image proportions). So I wanted to try to find the sweet spot for creating a GIF file with a small file size footprint that will also work in Peregrine’s texture generator.
I intend to say more about the process of generating these texture files in a subsequent post after I take this animated version of the Scorphonic Radio Selector back in to Second Life. For now, I’d just like to leave a few notes and links for myself so I don’t have to reanimate the reel the next time I want to do one of these.
Once again, I used MPEG Streamclip to grab a short portion of the video file. For the sake of smoothness in the animation, I wanted to the excerpt have the reels in roughly the same position in the first and final frame. As you’ll note, there are four little circles on each real so that would require a one-quarter rotation to serve my purpose. This accounted for a roughly 6 second clip.
I used the recommended 8 frames per second capture when saving the frames as individual PNG files. That meant roughly 48 files to be imported as layers in the GIMP. I knew the sucker would be way to big but I wanted to work through the entire process before tweaking things. I cropped the image to the dimensions you see in the animation (197×343) as the entire scene wasn’t required.
48 frames and 1.5 mb
The GIF file was saved and weighed in at 1.5 mb. This is way to big.
From there it was a question of deleting frames. Checking frame by frame, I noticed that frame 6 and frame 48 matched up perfectly. Counting by six, I kept frames 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, and 42 and deleted the rest. When these 8 frames were exported as a GIF, the file size was 254 kb. The playback was good but there was a repeated jitter. It turns out this is because when 6 and 48 played in sequence the result was a brief pause. So I deleted 6 and was almost satisfied with the result.
256 kb – jumping clouds
I wasn’t too keen on the clouds jumping round with time through the six frames. So I decided I needed to use layer masking. The only problem is that I couldn’t remember how to do it. Fortunately, another tutorial from Jim quickly reminded me how to do it.
As the end of the tl;dr post approaches, I must confess that this whole project seems a bit daft to me. But I think I have an obtainable objective in mind. I appreciate the chance to share the little steps and bits of learning that occur along the way. Up next, I need to see how the texture and script work in SL.
Here’s a little video greeting to all my fellow Camp Magic MacGuffin campers. Though I can’t join you in person, I will do my best to be there virtually.
For those able and interested, there’s an open invitation to stop by the Always Be Reflecting parcel at Corona Cay.
Leelzebub continues to set the pace with her recent outpouring of fun and inspiring ds106 assignments. I learned more about using photoshop in the 90 plus minutes it took me to do the Warhol This assignment than I ever did watching those YouTube tutorials that the youngsters like to make nowadays. And that’s one of the great and wacky things about doing these things.
What at the beginning looked like a quick and easy warm up assignment for Camp Magic MacGuffin (it begins tomorrow, BTW), turned into a serious challenge. It again forced me to confront the digital skill set I am least comfortable with: image editing. I haven’t a clue about color, perspective and all that jazz. I’ll certainly look at Warhol’s soup cans with greater appreciation after my struggle to follow this helpful tutorial in trying to make something out of this old Second Life snapshot I found in my inventory recently.
And I suppose this virtual friend from a long time ago is where the story in this assignment is. She and I met at the headquarters building of the now defunct Communist Party of Second Life. The group had formed in playful opposition to the then rampant commercialization taking place in SL. Lots of PR and marketing firms were trying to get their clients to invest big in the virtual world. It was supposed to be the next big thing.
Though it was just a few years ago that I dabbled in such politics and activism, I’d completely forgotten about it until I found the photos of this character whose name I cannot for the life of me recall. There’s even the possibility that the avatar was me. How’s that for weird?
And suddenly there are dozens of potential story lines fighting for my attention. They’re just begging me to run with them for a little while to see what happens. There’s been a lot of these unexpected imaginative flights of fancy these days. The text files needing to be revised and revisited are piling up like Oreo cookie crumbs on a Tardis (new series) bed.
But I haven’t time for such frivolity. I need to get my bags packed for CMM. Leelzebub is miles ahead and I’m stuck on Corona Cay with my domestic Daleks. They don’t even exterminate intruders while I’m away. Things are getting serious here – very serious.
Anybody interested in a podcast? Actually I did a podcast devoted especially to my experiences in Second Life a long time ago. But I don’t want to be posting stuff in too many places. That makes it to easy too lose track of things.
So I think I’ll continue to use the Scottlo Radio Blog for the hodgepodge of offerings that have recently begun sprouting up. Take this podcast recording for instance. Though I’ve been thinking recording something of late, this one began spontaneously and without any forethought.
Well that’s not exactly true. I’d spent an entire hour long train ride typing into my iPod Touch about the main story that comprises this recording: finally making the Scorphonic recorder work as originally intended. The text file I wrote was far too technical and cumbersome to wind up as a blog post without a huge amount of revision. But the fact of having written about it a few hours earlier allowed the story to come out easily and hopefully in a coherent manner when spoken aloud amid the hustle and bustle of another Tokyo commute.
It seems that a useful explanation of the recent direction taken on this blog is also offered during the 20 minute recording. Lot’s of things are happening, indeed.
Though this entry doesn’t adhere to any specific ds106 assignment, the sacred position the animated GIF holds in the ds106 canon permits me, I believe, to try to weave some sort of digital story. I’m motivated by a sentiment I’ve heard from many ds106 friends since my recent return to Second Life. Essentially, a lot of folks believe that Second Life is dead. This evening I took a little road trip in my recently purchased 1967 Chevy II that hopefully will put that notion to rest. Second Life is not dead – yet anyway.
One of the neat things about driving these roadways is the opportunity it presents to see the depth and breadth of what has been created in Second Life. For me the mind blowing part is that everything one encounters has been built and placed by other folks. There is certainly a good bit of frivolity and unsavory stuff on offer. But there are also breathtaking moments to be found along the way.
Travelling around in such a way also provides the opportunity to connect with random strangers. I had to skid to a stop when I saw the avatar above dressed in stunning traditional Turkish clothing. She was on her way to a cultural festival in SL that was to feature live music and dancing avatars. I offered to give her a ride there but she said it was on island region and she needed to teleport there after allowing me to snap a few photos.
After parting ways, I switched my t-shirt and hit the road again. It wasn’t long before I noticed this friendly pirate dancing on a picnic table along the roadway. When asked why I was driving around, I said I was planning on writing a travel log about motoring in Second Life.
When I asked what sort of story could I write about a dancing pirate, she said she had a few ideas. So we hopped in the Chevy and headed down the road and together brainstormed a madcap adventure in voice chat. The only problem was that our voice connection got cut whenever the car crossed from one region to the next. We drove a long loop around the region and were able to come up with an idea for a recurring series of photo blog posts and animated GIFs featuring a fast driving digital story teller who once was plagued with low self-esteem issues and his light-hearted sidekick: a scantily clad dancing pirate who’s forgotten more about Second Life than most people will ever learn.
I just hope Second Life lasts long enough for us to put a few of these together.
For some reason, animated GIFs have become an important part of the ds106 experience. Everybody, it seems, loves looking at them. And the process of making them is not as daunting as most may think. Prior to ds106, I never thought I could do one.
I remember with glee the moment my first effort at making one finally “played” the way I’d hoped it would. It took a long time and many mistakes were made along the way. But it was a learning experience. These little moments of personal accomplishment are valuable and important. One of the things that I most adore about ds106 is that it affords these sorts of opportunities for those willing to dive in.
So I was wondering what sort of role animated GIFs would play during this Camp Magic MacGuffin version of ds106. I was blown away when Ol’ Hatchet Jack made one from my first campsite photo from Second Life. I typo on my part in the comment on his blog referred to his effort as “an animate GIFt.” But in a sense, that what his remix of the photo was: a GIFt.
This morning I asked myself if it was possible to work with animated GIFs in the virtual space. As I didn’t know the answer, Google was used. It turns out it’s easy peasy. Perigrine Salon has a web application that will upload and convert your GIF file into the appropriate file format and provide a script of making the animation run once it’s attached to an object in Second Life. Well maybe it’s not easy peasy until you get the hang of it. But it works like a champ.
The video above was another chance for me to practice doing machinima and to demonstrate how the Buddy Holly GIF I created a few months ago look in Second Life. If you want to see it in person, all you have to do is teleport in to Corona Cay.
This was mostly an experiment to figure out how to do a machinima video. As the recent spate of blog post would indicate, it looks like my participation in Camp Magic MacGuffin will have to be from the virtual world unless or until I’m able to get the motor home unstuck from the sand. I’ll do my best to participate as fully as I can.
Making this movie was fairly simple, though it was time consuming. The video was captured with iShowU and edited with iMovie. The camera movements were done with a Space Navigator.
The musical selection should have been attributed on the video as well but I wasn’t able to get the titles to work in iMovie. The song Relaxing Birds is by tigabeatz and can be found on the ccMixter website.
Camp is now over (see the final story. If you are craving an experience like this, head over to ds106 and see how to participate. For more on the Summer of Magic Macguffin, see.....
