Animated GIF's

NSFW

We use several visual cues to assist the model to get in exactly the right position. One such cue is a ceiling-mounted soft box facing the model, intended to light the face. As luck would have it, we discovered that the outer the edges of the softbox visually line up precisely with the outer edges of a Dexion rack about 90 cm behind it, but only if the subject in exactly the right position.

I think this is referred to as: alignment by parallax! ;-)

mph yeah but 150kg is a decent weight limit it’s just under 24 stone

Edited by Jeffstu

Jeffstu said

mph yeah but 150kg is a decent weight limit it’s just under 40 stone

:) ;)

mph said

Jeffstu said

mph yeah but 150kg is a decent weight limit it’s just under 40 stone

:) ;)

Not quite as much as that lol. Assuming 1kg = 2.21lb and 14lb = 1 stone, it works out approximately...

• 150kg = 331.5 lb = 23.67 stone.
  

Granted, its still considerably more than yer average model (50kg-60kg) ;-)

It was just ever so slightly tongue in cheek! ;)

Trouble is this is the internet. So we could be responsible for some 40 stone photographer (or perhaps even two 20 stone photographers) giving the thing a pre-shoot try-out, and wondering where that strange but distinctive smell of burning electrics is coming from! lol. :-)

waist.it yeah I corrected my post but not before someone replied to it, heh

waist.it said

Trouble is this is the internet. So we could be responsible for some 40 stone photographer (or perhaps even two 20 stone photographers) giving the thing a pre-shoot try-out, and wondering where that strange but distinctive smell of burning electrics is coming from! lol. :-)

Well, he said modestly, I could happily share it with the sort of models I prefer and have capacity to spare! ;) ;) ;)

Jeffstu said

waist.it yeah I corrected my post but not before someone replied to it, heh

Yeah, seems tonight we're all just too "quick on the draw" - as they say in those old westerns! :-)

Back to the plot: what sort of anims are you hoping to shoot? And are you planning to use the video method or the stop-frame method? In my albeit limited experience, they need to be approached quite differently.

waist.it said

Jeffstu said

waist.it yeah I corrected my post but not before someone replied to it, heh

Yeah, seems tonight we're all just too "quick on the draw" - as they say in those old westerns! :-)

Back to the plot: what sort of anims are you hoping to shoot? And are you planning to use the video method or the stop-frame method? In my albeit limited experience, they need to be approached quite differently.

Oh, if you see a mistake you have to get in there and quote it before they can edit it! :)

waist.it

This one happened spur of the moment as the turntable was there gave us an idea.

So been learning the best I can with it currently

Was done as a burst of images so assume classed as stop frame

And not sure what I’d like to get next but will probably involve rope. On the lookout for ideas atm.

Think it would be cool to get a suspension one, a swivel on the anchor would probably work if any swing could be minimised.

I guess would look a little like the nine inch nails closer video

Jeffstu said

waist.it

This one happened spur of the moment as the turntable was there gave us an idea.

So been learning the best I can with it currently

Was done as a burst of images so assume classed as stop frame

And not sure what I’d like to get next but will probably involve rope. On the lookout for ideas atm.

Think it would be cool to get a suspension one, a swivel on the anchor would probably work if any swing could be minimised.

I guess would look a little like the nine inch nails closer video

Interesting. Well during my list shoot but one, I was introduced to "Boomerangs". Model asked me to snap some of her on her iPhone - and being a lover of new toys, I gladly agreed. They only last a few seconds but they were astonishingly easy to create - though I would have set up continuous lighting had I known in advance we would play with these things. Trouble is they are in Quicktime format, and I am trying to batch convert them to gif using ffmpeg - and make them repeat. I'll try to post some here, once I figure out which ffmpeg switches I need to use.  I'll post that too, hopefully! ;-)

mph said

It was just ever so slightly tongue in cheek! ;)

Nah!

You mustn't do that. If you do that, the weight of your head becomes lop-sided.
Then the whole of your body becomes lop-sided.
Then the mass pressing on the turny-tableoid is unstable and it will wobblyise and then the moddley-crumpet-bird* will topply over, splat all fall down bumpy on the botty.
Much giggly in the watcher-peeps but hugeness in the sadly for the moddley.
Oh deep folly in the fundamold.

* It is to be noted that this term is not sexyist or demeanarising within the world of the great Prof. Stanley Unwin.
Who it is that inventeded the proper communicaterising style as practised on the great telly-goggle-box in the days of the fiftieses.
Also, as well too 'an all, a decent bloke with none of the nasty deep badness mysoginismitism.

Some higher end cameras have a setting that will do this for you.

Jerome Razoir If you are a Stanley Unwin fan, then you'll probably love this - assuming you haven't heard it already:-

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogdens%27_Nut_Gone_Flake

Jeffstu here are a couple of "Boomerangs" I just converted from Apple's .mov format into .gif. These were taken by me on the model's iPhone, and subsequently converted to GIF using ffmpeg...

I had to take some liberties. GIF is a very old and inefficient file-format compared to modern video formats. But it's the one we are currently stuck with. So I chopped the frame-rate right back to 8fps. I also used a "complex filter" to reduce the colour palette. GIF only allows a maximum of 256 colours. And like I said before, the lighting was somewhat suboptimal too. But despite all that, the GIF is still nearly 10x bigger than the original video file. When I have a little more time I'll play with the GIFS in GIMP. But for now, here are a couple of Boomerangs of the lovely Jessica Maria shot 2020-02-02.

Here is the ffmpeg command I used. I've posted so you (or anyone who is into this sort of stuff) can tinker with it to suit your needs, should you go for the video-loop method...

• ffmpeg -i inputfile.mov -filter_complex "[0:v] fps=8, split [a][b];[a] palettegen [p];[b][p] paletteuse" outputfile.gif

And here's the main site I used to assemble the appropriate filter.

• https://engineering.giphy.com/how-to-make-gifs-with-ffmpeg/

Rather nice of GIPHY to tell us how it's done, I thought! ;-) And ffmpeg is free, open source and available for Linux, Mac and Windows.  DM me if you need any links etc. Don't want to bore everyone to death :-) And for all I know, there might even be an option in the app to create a GIF.

waist.it You are a very fine humin bean, sir!

I absolutely adored Stanley Unwin when I was a child. Very clever man.
You do not realise just how clever until you try to do it!

If you are good at finding obscure stuff.
I will love you forever (in a socially acceptable manner) if you can find Richard Herne as Mr. Pastry demonstrating a kind of dance involving jumping from one wooden chair to another.
I do not recall ever seeing it in the fifties and saw it on the TV when stuck in my hotel room in Holland one evening.
Apparently the Dutch love it so much they show it every Christmas.
Which has got to be better than The Great Escape.