ds106 dailycreate for December 5, 2013: “Create a visual that might accompany one of the mashed up headlines from @twoheadlines.”
The original tweet: https://twitter.com/TwoHeadlines/status/407970369447161856
Star Wars Joins Instagram With A Apple Inc. Selfie
— Two Headlines (@TwoHeadlines)
So this is supposed to be Vader taking a selfie but it’s Jar Jar that appears as his own image instead of Vader, like Vader is actually Jar Jar. Now that I think about it later, though, it just looks like he’s watching Jar Jar on the ipad. D’oh. My idea was a little too complicated to come out well in a visual image. Oh well…it took me long enough to get this done at all I’m not going to go back and fix it now.
The process (in GIMP)
I got the Vader image from the GIF Fight tumblr from August 2013—I had remembered this image from last summer. You can see the cool gifs people made with this image on the GIF Fight tumblr arhive for Aug 2013.
I then got an image of an ipad from Flickr; it took awhile to find one that was in approximately the right angle. Here’s the one I used: “iPad car mount,” by Jan Hammershaug, licensed CC-BY.
Lastly I had to figure out what should be on the ipad screen. I tried to find a good Yoda image that was openly licensed, but no dice. So why not Jar Jar Binks? Here’s the image I used: “Jar Jar Binks at SGTTC2010,” by Parka, licensed CC-BY-SA.
I first put the ipad in Vader’s hand by scaling it to the right size and then selecting around it by going to Select->Float, then Layer->To New Layer to get the ipad onto a new layer. I then deleted the rest of that image with the ipad.
I got Vader’s finger in front of the ipad the same way: I selected around the finger, floated the selection, then put it on a new layer so I could put it in front of the ipad.
Then I selected around the original image that was inside the ipad frame, did Select->Float and then Layer->to new layer to get that image out of the ipad frame. I then deleted the new layer with the image that was originally inside the ipad frame.
Finally, I had to crop the Jar Jar image and scale it so it would be small enough to fit inside the ipad frame.
Now I had layers in this order:
1. finger
2. ipad frame
3. Jar jar
4. the rest of the vader image
But of course, the Jar Jar image wasn’t at the right angle to look like it was actually on the ipad. That’s when I discovered the “perspective” tool in GIMP, which lets you warp a layer so it takes on a new perspective. I played with this a bit, moving various corners various amounts to see what it looked like, until I got the perspective looking pretty good.
I also had to play around with scaling the Jar Jar layer so that it didn’t stick out the sides of the ipad frame but still fit within it. In the end I had to use the paintbrush tool to cover over some parts of the image that were a little too small for the frame and some of the background was showing through. But it works okay.
I’m amazed I got this to look pretty much like I pictured it when I thought of it.
This image is licensed CC-BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/