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.
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.
I am really sick of all the 3D movies Hollywood is shoving down our throats. It’s just a gimmick that attempts to draw more money out of our pockets, it’s “snake oil”. What’s worse is that the mainstream public hasn’t caught on to the trick and are handing over extra money that Hollywood doesn’t deserve. And when the mainstream public continues to be blind, Hollywood will not get the clue and will go right on selling “snake oil”.
I will admit that there have been some movies that I have paid extra money for the 3D experience, but lucky for me they were actually good 3D movies. The first was back in 2007 for the all CGI story of Beowulf. And I will have to also admit that it was a pretty decent experience. The other worthy experience was Avatar in 2009 – although the story was really weak but the visuals were really breathtaking. I guess the point I am making is that maybe 1% of the 3D movies out there are possibly worth the experience, if you have the extra money to throw away. Those movies that were filmed or created originally in 3D and not in post-production can be worthy of consideration for viewing.
A friend of mine over at The Unique Geek listserv found a really good article at Tech Republic that sums up the Hollywood scam better than I ever could. I encourage you to read this article and stop being duped, as the article is so aptly named.
Read it here: Stop being duped by the 3D scam
A few days late but I wanted to post my winning a free t-shirt from Last Exit to Nowhere.
A couple of weeks ago I ordered two Blade Runner t-shirts from them. If you’ve never heard of Last Exit definitely check out their site catalogue of movie t-shirts. I love their stuff. I had already ordered their Nexus 6 t-shirt last year so this time around I ordered the red Off World Colonies and Origami Unicorn shirts.
Last week on Twitter Last Exit to Nowhere held a contest to post pictures of customers in their t-shirt.
Here is what I submitted:
Lucky for me I won. Since I already had a few t-shirts from Last Exit I let Techie Jr. choose the free t-shirt. He chose a shirt from High Fidelity only because the shirt had a monkey on it, he has never seen the movie.
Huge thanks to the guys at Last Exit to Nowhere. Check out their site and follow them on Twitter.
For those that don’t know me, I am a huge Blade Runner fan. If you look back on this blog you will get a few hints of just how much of a fan. Well today I received a package in the mail of an item I have been wanting to get for myself from Think Geek for a very long time; the Blade Runner LED umbrella. Here is picture of myself holding it.
The only problem with the LED in this umbrella is that it is not as bright as was portrayed in the film, as seen in this shot.
But, I really don’t have a lot to complain about since it was free. Think Geek has a program that as you buy items you accumulate points to use toward merchandise. Well, having purchased a lot for Christmas presents this past year, I accrued enough points to get the umbrella.
Now, if only I could get the Rick Deckard blaster prop I would then be a very, very happy Blade Runner fan.
On the subject of Blade Runner fans, check out this fan made video I found by Onur Yeldan.
Ordinary Man 