How I feel when I have too much coffee.

How I feel when I have too much coffee.

I was making this GIF this morning at a coffee shop while working on another GIF that I still have yet to finish. That one will be posted soon.

August Animated GIF challenge #11 is making a wiggle stereoscopic GIF. Seemed pretty easy—take a photo from two different angles and make a GIF so it wiggles. But this, like all digital storytelling, is an art. And I have a lot to learn. This one does not look like 3D like these sorts of things are supposed to. Rather, it looks like a jumping bunch of confusion.

I should have made the angles between the two images less—I should have taken the photos without moving so much in between. Lesson #1. I wanted the coffee cup to wiggle but not the computer so much. But the coffee cup wiggles too much and the keyboard of the computer wiggles too much too.

I should not have had a great deal of the cafe in the background, because what I wanted to stay fairly lined up was the computer screen, which meant that the background in the cafe moved a lot, which was really really annoyingly dizzy-i-fying. Lesson #2. What I did (in GIMP) to help with this was create new black layers on top of each of the two images, then create a layer mask with a selection so that the black layer showed only in the cafe part behind the computer. I reduced the opacity of the black layer to about 90%, then applied the layer masks to the black layers and merged them down onto the two original images. So now the background is blacked out a bit and it’s not quite as distracting. But I could have used more black than this, even. Maybe nearly full black, because the cafe movement is still distracting.

I should not have had a glare on the computer screen, because that moves too much with the two images as well. Lesson #3.

And why is my image so pixelated? Really…this has been happening with gifs a lot lately. Is it the gif format?

But it’s late and I need to go to bed, so, well, it is what it is for today.

Even though this did not turn out how I would have liked, I learned a lot, which is a good thing too. I want to make another one sometime that looks better, and then I’ll post it to the assignments bank as an example. This one…not so much an example of the right thing to do!

The GIF on my computer in the image is taking a little while because I have to do something to it layer by layer, which is kind of a pain but I hope it will turn out looking good as a result. Hopefully tomorrow or the next day that one will be done!

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