Seder-Masochism Archives - Page 15 of 36

GNU & Improved GIFs

Big ups to my friend Barry Israelewitz, who wrote a shell script for ffmpeg (based on this article shared in this comment by Paul Wise) and taught me how to use Terminal on my mac to make much better animated gifs than Flash exports directly. Currently it’s significantly more work than just exporting .gif from Flash, because I have to instead export a PNG sequence, import the frames to Quicktime 7, and export as a new .mov to use as an input file for making the gif. This may be streamlined a little bit in the future, but for now at least I can make higher quality gifs if I need to.

Below are close-up details of single frames. “Before” is here, “after” is above.

Here’s a smaller-sized (because fewer frames) animated gif for side-by-side before-and-after comparison:

Much better, no? Plus using Terminal is METAL.

The Promised Land

Soon I hope to be able to make gifs that look a lot better than this. A friend is helping, but he first needs to teach me some command-line stuff which I’ve never done on my Mac. Meanwhile here’s a dithery giffy glimpse of the Promised Land that is smaller than 640×480 because WordPress has a 2MB limit for image uploads. My next modification to this scene will be adding milk and honey, and maybe some rainbows coming out of the flying unicorns’ butts.

Livestock Exodus

³²Also take your flocks and your herds, as ye have said, and be gone; and bless me also. –Exodus 12, KJV

A Bug in My Ass

So I’m animating an ass for Seder-Masochism, so the Hebrews have something to carry their stuff out of Egypt so their arms are free to let them walk jauntily and leap around. I export a test and see this weird artifact on the upper foreleg. Flash is rendering the shape as it looks in vector editing mode. If you look carefully you’ll see the point on the upper right has a little bezier handle. Weird, right?

It’s a bug in Flash (pre-Adobe Macromedia Flash 8, the only Flash I use), the likes of which I’ve never seen before. To make the artifact go away I had to re-draw the foreleg. Below is a render sans bug.

What’s great about this is it solved my problem about how to best use “ass” in a blog post title. I was considering “What an Ass” or “A Fine Ass” or “I Made Myself an Ass,” but this is much better.

Crossing the Red Sea

Gettin’ pumped to conquer the Promised Land!

Every country that exists originated through violent conquest. The victims of these conquests were victors and conquerors earlier. Is violent conquest legitimate? If not, then no country or nation is legitimate. If nations are legitimate, then violent conquest must be also. I ask these questions as I animate the mythical Ancient Hebrews’ quest to conquer Canaan (which was already occupied). There’s just no way to make it look good by modern humanitarian values, and I wonder why that is.

Happy Heeb

This Hebrew is getting ready to walk right out of Egypt, bouncing along to a song that has beats every 19 frames (oy!). Here’s how he looked in an earlier scene.