richardjones_

journal space for digital media fundamentals

[richardjonesataca]

This was initially going to be my meme appropriation gif, but I later realised I misread the assignment outline and that I was supposed to include an appropriated piece of famous art. I instead thought the meme was what we were appropriating. Oops.

[richardjonesataca]

Here's a loop of just the hand-drawn part of my animation

[richardjonesataca]

My final gif compressed for tumblr

[richardjonesataca]

Workflow: -Collect a number of interesting, similar looking pictures from the web -Past each image onto a seperate layer -Make each image visible for 1 frame at a time @0.08sec p/frame -This creates a rapidly changing background animation -Edit each image by duplicating it twice -Shift each duplicate slightly to each side of the original -Reduce transparency of each duplicate -Change Hue of each duplicate -This creates a fake "chromatic aberration" effect, like watching a VHS tape on an old television or taking photos with an aged camera lens. -Begin hand-drawing the self portrait frame by frame -For each successive self portrait layer on each successive frame, reduce the transparency of the previous layer so provide a point of reference to accurately draw the current frame. -Repeat this process for the colour once the hand-drawn lineart is complete

Every frame in this .gif was arranged manually and all but the last several were digitally hand-drawn from scratch using a wacom intuous 5 tablet. 

It took me a while to settle on a conceptual direction for my self portrait and I found myself procrastinating a lot. I decided I wanted to save myself the stress and just portray myself and my ability as naturally as possible so that I didn't have to stress myself too much by struggling to brainstorm - So, I decided procrastination would be my core concept as it's something I do a lot. Procrastination for me is typically just escapism through reading comics, watching movies or playing video games. I feel video games really represent an ultimate sort of escapism and given my previous experience with video game mods and gifs mentioned earlier here on my tumblr I figured they'd be a good starting point. Using methods described earlier on my tumblr I created a rapidly changing background animation using images from old video games and video game mods/hacks and editted them all individually and manually to give it a very retro look. I then hand-drew my self portrait over most frames and decided I wanted my face to melt away shortly before the end of the animation where a final frame rapidly flashes the words "You're dead" - The idea here is the irony of procrastination where all you do is escape life until it's over. Complications encountered were solely to do with .gif encode optimisation and uploading. Despite meeting tumblr's criteria, no amount of optimisation and compression allowed me to upload it directly. I eventually went through imgur which required me to cut a substantial portion of my animation, cutting the amount of hand-drawn frames in half to produce what is seen here. Frame Count: 35 ([email protected][email protected]) Duration: 3.12 seconds

[richardjonesataca]

An album by rapper Lakutis - the album art appropriates works by Frida Kahlo. This inspired my final piece.

[richardjonesataca]

Meme & Appropriation final gif Meme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzuh4xRdc8g Artwork Appropriated: Frida Kahlo's series of Self portraits

Workflow: -Use gifsoup (Online gif generator) to turn youtube video of chosen meme into a gif -Open gif in photoshop -Resize gif to something larger for a nicer canvas to draw over -Reduce transparency of each frame of the gif so that it can be drawn over -Draw lineart using the underlying transparent gif frames as a guideline

The idea of a 'meme' is, at least in my opinion, very vague at present. The place of memetic humor within the contemporary zeitgeist is very much blurred and a lot of the humor is lost in that amibiguity. By definition, something memetic is a piece of cultural information of some sort that is shared throughout a culture via repetition over a multitude of individuals. When searching for memes online for this project, I found there was a great misconception that if something was funny and it was on the internet, it was automatically a meme; though this certainly isn't the case. I decided that viral videos were a good example of true memetic humor currently, as Youtube is an ideal platform for widespread reproduction of something unanimously considered funny. The video "smooth audience member" is a classic viral clip of an audience member being genuinely funny during a live recording and there are now hundreds of similar videos of people recreating the video, remixing it, creating musical scores for it and all manner of other renditions. When i began working on this project I was listening to Lakutis' latest studio album and noticed he had appropriated a piece of artwork by Frida Kahlo for the album art. I found it hilarious and decided to do something similar. Frida Kahlo has a very recognisable outward aesthetic and being instantly recognisable is key to memetic humor, so she was a perfect basis for appropriation. In the end I feel I've created a genuinely funny image with ties to an existing piece of viral, memetic humor and an existing artist.

After learning a lot about gif compression and Tumblr's image regulations with the first part of my assignment, I had no complications this time around.

Frame Count: 24 ([email protected][email protected]) Duration: 1.88 seconds

[richardjonesataca]

quick, stylised, simple self portrait exploration that I did before I begun working on the hand-drawn aspect of my animation.

[richardjonesataca]

For my first gif I'm working on a hand-drawn, animated selfportrait. I want to overlay the hand-drawn content onto a rapidly changing bakground to add some speed and a dynamic feeling to the overall animation. This image shows fof the technique I'll be using to create the animated background: -Find an interested image -Paste it into a new frame -Duplicate the image and shift it slightly to the left, dropping transparency -Repeat process, shifting this time to the right and dropping transparency again -Edit both the left and right transparent duplicates using the image>adjustments>hue tool and pushing the hue slider for the left duplicate all the way to the left, and the hue slider for the right duplicate all the way to the right -(This creates a 'fake 3d' look that I really like) -Continue this with every other frame -Add a single tween frame between frames to smooth animation -Finally, add an 'Overlay' layer with a transparent gradient above all other layers to help consolidate colours and add a nice ambience to the animation.

[richardjonesataca]

an example of how the gifs look after being uploaded to the rom and played on the NES

[richardjonesataca]

Given the recent focus on gifs I once again decided to play around with gif animations during a live musical performance I recently participated in. Similarly to the video i posted earlier on this page, whilst playing music I controller simple, short gif loops using an old arcade joystick attached to a Nintendo gaming console (NES). Using a rom mod I was able to upload gifs seamlessly during my performance and control them using the arcade stick. The only difficulty is the gifs used required heavy editing prior to uploading them to the rom - as an 8bit console, I was only able to use up to a maximum of 32 frame gif animations and all framecounts had to be divisible by 8. As well as this there were certain palette issues I had to rectify to make them work on the rom too. In the end it all worked great and looked fantastic up on the screen. The theme of the night was Japanese music so the content of the gifs themselves are all taken from various pieces of Japanese pop culture.

[richardjonesataca]

Despite being reasonably familiar with the gif format, it had only recently occurred to me that I couldn't actually define a gif in an objective way if I had to. A quick look at the Graphics Interchange Format Specification sheet offers a very technical and all-encompassing definition of the encode method. 

'GIF' (tm) is CompuServe's standard for defining generalized color raster images. This 'Graphics Interchange Format' (tm) allows high-quality, high-resolution graphics to be displayed on a variety of graphics hardware and is intended as an exchange and display mechanism for graphics images.

http://www.w3.org/Graphics/GIF/spec-gif87.txt

The most practical method of understanding gifs, beyond their ability to be animated, is the limit of 256 colours to the palette. This is the key reason why .gif is not a standard alternative to .jpg or .png - it is unable to produce a wide enough range of colours for accurate reproduction of something such as a photograph.

[thethirstydude]

fish wizards are a meditative bunch

[richardjonesataca]

Simple hand-drawn animation presented as a gif

[nanapantsu-deactivated20250128]

Just giffing arounddddd

[richardjonesataca]

My girlfriend tried out one of the many gif apps on the apple store. This is the result using just three frames.

[richardjonesataca]

This is a visual sequence I created for a DJ set I did last year - I loaded small .gif files onto a rom which I then ran using an old Nintendo home console. The result was a basic display of the image that could be manipulated live using a controller. Using a live capture device you could create a longer gif by recording a live performance using this method.

[blakztringgg]

[richardjonesataca]

Composite use of both appropriated media - existing animation - and photographic self portraiture. A potential means of including appropriated media, digitally drawn content and photographic content.

[mustardhamsters]

gameboy babe glitch

[richardjonesataca]

Very popular technique I've seen on tumblr lately - intentionally causing video codecs to read wrong or 'glitch' in media players. After recording a successful interesting glitch, the recording is then encoded to gif for easy sharing on tumblr. Could be a potentially very fun way to incorporate photographic material into my 30 second animation.

[richardjonesataca]

Not quite a 30second gif, but a great piece of hand drawn animation that utilises relatively simple techniques. This short animation goes to show that even ‘sloppy’ lineart looks fine when animated. Photoshop offers tools to replicate this form of animation very easily, I think I’ll likely hand-draw my gif.