Number 2 as anvil

In the episode of The Prisoner called “Hammer into Anvil,” Number 2 pretty much loses it by the end. One part that really intrigued me was when he was shown towards the end stroking the penny farthing. I’ve seen some suggestions online about what the penny farthing is all about in the series, and in an interview McGoohan talks about the problems with progress…it seems to maybe have something to do with an ironic statement about the progress we have achieved (not much, really, despite our advances in technology). Maybe we haven’t progressed very far morally, for example.

So with that in mind, I find it very interesting that when Number 2 loses it he ends up stroking this ironic symbol of progress, as if he thinks it’s going to be his saviour. It’s what he believes in; it comforts him.

It’s also just a creepy sequence, as I tried to capture in this gif.

HammerIntoAnvil-ThePrisoner-long-fnl

the process

I made this in GIMP.

1. I used screencast-o-matic to do a screen capture of this part of the episode while it was playing on my computer.

2. I opened it in MPEG streamclip to capture just the frames I wanted, and then used “export other formats” and “as image sequence.” I exported to jpg with 8 frames per sec I think.

3. In GIMP, I had 32 layers, and I had to repeat some of them to get him to close his eyes again after he opens them. I just reversed those layers. So by the time I was done I had many, many layers, and I wanted to reduce the file size.

4. I cut out some of the layers, every other one, for part of the sequence. When I did it for all of it then parts were too choppy.

5. I resized the image to be 400px wide.

6. I tried changing the colour mode to “indexed” before saving, but that made the finished gif even bigger than it was before. Even when I set the max colours on indexed to 100!

 

So it’s 1.5 MB as is, which isn’t too bad.

 

And just for fun…

I created two more out of this sequence.

Eyes closed:

 

HammerIntoAnvilShorter

 

Now, just the eyes opening and closing:

 

HammerIntoAnvilEyes

 

GIFing A, B and C

For week 3 of #prisoner106, we were asked to do the “Animating The Prisoner” assignment.

I struggled with this one a lot for some unknown reason. I love making animated GIFs from video because technically, it’s pretty easy once you get the tools.

What I struggled with was finding sequences to animate from the episodes I’ve seen. I have a couple of ideas, but as this assignment is due in 1.5 hours, I figured I just do one so far and post it here.

In “A, B, and C,” Number 6 is drugged for two nights in a row and taken to a room where his dreams show up as videos on a screen, and they are manipulated from the outside to see if he was going to “sell out” (they wondered if maybe that’s why he retired). I was struck by the fact that there are two very similar sequences where the camera zooms in quickly on his wrist, where there are marks from the injections. In the first sequence, there is just one mark b/c it’s after the first night. After the second night, there are two.

I decided to animate these sequences to make it seem like it was just one mark, then he looks again and now it’s two, then he looks again and now it’s one, etc., etc.

 

OneMarkOrTwo-Prisoner106

The Process

I’m not sure I could explain it any better than is done in this great tutorial given here. I used MPEG Streamclip and GIMP as suggested in that tutorial, and used the settings given there.

I took a sequence of him sitting on his bed and then suddenly looking at his wrist and just duplicated it so it looks like he is doing the same motion but having different numbers of marks on his wrist every time he lifts it to see.

I keep getting a little frustrated at the pixelated colours on my gifs, but then discovered that the .gif format will only take about 256 colours, so there’s really not a lot you can do about this from what I can tell, when your source files have lots of colours and the gif will only have that many.