Here’s another attempt at an animated gif from one of my favorite horror movies. John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness. When I first saw this film in the theaters back in 1994 it kind of creeped me out. And I don’t scare easily from films.
My only issues so far with creating these animated images is that I haven’t found a way yet to fine tune the clarity. The image you see above is not as clean and crisp as the source.
After searching around the internet for other cool animated gifs I found out that there is an actual artistic term for some of the really superb motion images. It’s called cinemagraph. Just do a Google search for the word and you’ll find some really interesting images. I guess that new favorite site of mine can be seen as cinemagraphs while the few images I have created can simply be called animated gifs.
High class animated images = cinemagraphs
Low class animated images = simple animated gifs
Even Lifehacker recently posted a pretty extensive, and difficult to follow, How To on how to create a cinemagraph.
I mentioned this last Halloween as one of my new recent favorite Halloween movies, Trick ‘r Treat. Here is an animated gif I created from that movie.
I recently discovered a really cool Tumblr blog that has some extremely clever and crafted animated gifs from movie scenes and has now become my new favorite site. The site can be found here:
This motivated me to find out how to create my own animated gifs. It took some digging but I finally found a forum post over at the Ubuntu forums that has some really good steps on how to create an animated gif. The thread can be found here.
I am laying out the steps below, basically, the same as in the thread mainly so that in the future, if that thread disappears, I will have this post to reference again. So really, this post is mostly for my benefit.
To break it down this is what I do, keeping in mind that I am doing it from Linux Mint. I take a DVD, or ISO that is created from a DVD, and export it using Handbrake. Then using the steps from the forum I ran this from the terminal:
mplayer -ao null -ss 0:57:32 -endpos 5 movie.m4v -vo jpeg:outdir=moviedirector
Then I open Gimp and select and open the first .jpg file I want to use in my clip. After, I then open the remaining files I want in my clip as layers in Gimp. If you want to resize the animated clip to something smaller this is when you scale the image after all the layers have been added. The next step is to save the file as a .gif selecting to save as an animation in the process. Immediately after in the export area I enable it to ‘loop forever’ and set the delay between frames anywhere between 55 to 75 ms, depending upon the scene. Then under frame disposal, ‘One frame per layer’ is selected from the drop down and ‘Use delay entered above for all frames’ and ‘Use disposal entered above for all frames’ are enabled. Then select Save.
Here is the first clip I created from 12 Monkeys.
And my second clip from one of my all time favorite movies, Blade Runner.
For the rest of the month of October, you can expect to find more animated gif scenes from horror movies here on my blog.
If you want to create your own animated gif and are not on Linux, I found quite a few helpful videos on You Tube of people creating animated gifs on Windows and OS X.
Ordinary Man 