Burpees for Bobby

Greg McVerry asked ds106 participants to make something to promote a campaign called “Burpees for Bobby,” which helps out Greg’s nephew, baby Bobby, who has a type of leukodystrophy. Do a web search about it and you’ll weep as I did. You can donate to the cause, here.

I was looking around for drawings of burpees that were openly licensed so I could make an animation, but I couldn’t easily find any. So I made my own, modeled on a stick figure drawing I found on the web, but can’t now find anymore for some reason. I used the Paper 53 app to do it, then sent it to myself over email.

I opened the jpg and did screen shots of each of the parts to put them on separate layers in GIMP. I had to fiddle around with scaling the layers to get the stick figures to be approximately the same size–the heads and bodies of each one ended up different sizes when I did the screen shots.

Then I opened new white layers in GIMP and added the text layers to the beginning and end. To get the “GO!!” to flash, I just alternated the GO layers with blank white layers.

I repeated the burpee sequence 3 times, then gave my poor stick figure a rest for a little while, then started the animation over again.

The only tricky thing here was to get the timing of the animation right. I had to go back and figure out how to specify the duration of each layer in an animation by adding it to the layer name in milliseconds, such as shown in this screen shot:

Here’s the finished product! The one thing I’d change if it weren’t late and I didn’t need to go to bed is that the jumping person doesn’t really look like they’re jumping but rather standing and raising their arms. Would need to raise that figure up a bit. But bed calls…