363 - Cranky Monkey

Day 363. I met this cranky little fellow in the Sacred Monkey Forest in Ubud while we were in Bali a few weeks ago. I had my GoPro camera on a GoPole and tried to get a closeup shot but he wasn't so keen on the idea. Maybe I should have talked with his manager first. This clip was in the video I posted a few days ago, but I used a free tool called Gifyoutube to take those few frames out of the video and loop them as a GIF file. Hours of fun!

327 - Santa's Helper

Dat 327. We set up a Santa's Cave in the library at school to take Polaroid photos of the kids with Santa (yes apparently you can still buy Polaroid cameras! Who knew?). I was helping set up the camera for taking photos and took this test shot to check the framing. I videoed the Polaroid with Paper Camera on the iPad, then converted it to a GIF using the 5 Second Gif app.

287 - Dancing with the Droids

Day 287. Androidify is a neat little app for Android that let's you make customised versions of the Android robot. The app got an update recently that adds lots of extra "dress up" features, but also adds actions then saves as an animated GIF file. Like this. Dance little Android!

273 - Around We Go

Day 273. The Ferris Wheel at Glenelg Pier turns quite slowly but when you take a few frames using Lapse It, then export those frames to the 5 Seconds app for editing, trim off the unnecessary LapseIt promotion at the end and then finally export it out as an animated GIF file, this what you get...

268 - Dancing Fool

Day 268. Just messing around in Scratch again, I created this silly little animation of my head on another sprite's body. Just press the space bar to start the silliness. There are a number of animated bits that all run in parallel.

     

266 - Sweet As Bro

Day 266. Today was the second day of the Sydney Google Teacher Academy, and there was a sizeable contingent of New Zealanders there. I offered to take a group photo for them, and deliberately took this sequence of shots, suspecting that Google+ would automatically turn them into the animated gif file, known in G+ as an AutoAwesome. My suspicions were correct and it did, and here is the result. So is this my creation? Or just a random thing made by a Google algorithm?

265 - A Hive of Activity

Day 265. During the Google Teacher Academy today I set up my GoPro camera at the front of the room and let it take a shot every second to create this animation of our working space during a short break in the event. This set of about 400+ images was imported into Photoshop CC as an image sequence, resized to a more manageable size, cropped and exported as a GIF.

264 - Airport Departure

Day 264. Arrived back from Melbourne tonight and used the Hyperlapse app to capture a stopframe animation of my walk from the gate back out through the exit from the terminal.

258 - The Droid You're Looking For

Day 258. I shot a video of this little toy Android the other day, then used the 5Second app to turn it into a looping (or is that limping) GIF file. Keep marching little Droid, keep marching!

249 - Hyperlapse

Day 249. Hyperlapse is a type of stop frame animation that uses some additional techniques to remove camera shake, manage the camera exposure settings and so on in order to make the motion smoother.  This was just a little sample I made to try it out. I think it would be interesting to shoot it from a bike or other moving object, rather than walking.

248 - That Lazy Susan

Day 248. Out to dinner with good friends tonight at Chin Chin in Singapore, I made this short animation of the Lazy Susan turntable. Shot with a Nexus 5 using LapseIt for Android, then imported into Photoshop CC as an MP4 file, then converted to an animated GIF and exported back out again.

239 - Egg Race

Day 239. I found this neat app called Animation Studio (free today in the App Store!) and while the UI is definitely a bit old school, (woodgrain anyone?) it appears to be quite a powerful animation tool. This little sample was just my first attempt at making something with it... I'm sure with a bit more time and experimentation and a stylus, I could cone up with something quite cool.

It exports as a video, and I then used an app called 5sGIF to turn it into an animated Gif file.

169 - Boy Racers

Day 169. While at the Flat Connections Conference this week I had the opportunity to take the students outside one afternoon and show them how to make stop motion videos. This is just a quick little sample we made but the kids went on to do some very cool little videos that showed a great deal of creativity and fun.

161 - Out of the Shadows

Day 161. Using the iPad app Sketchvid, this sketch is based on a shadow portrait photograph. I like the graphic nature of the black and white.

159 - Marsupial

Day 159. Today's create has been appsmashed together in a way I haven't tried before. First, I created a 3D model of a creature, based loosely on a kangaroo, in Autodesk's incredible 123D Creature app for the iPad. Unfortunately this app cannot export the finished creature as a complete video clip so it's hard to appreciate the 3D nature of the model in still images.

To get around this problem, once it was constructed, modelled and lit, I then exported a series of images of the model in slightly different positions to the Camera Roll. These were then imported into an app called 5 Second GIF, which the App Store assured me could turn a series of still images into an animation. Sure enough, this was the final result. I think it works pretty well.

150 - Hong Kong Night Walk

Day 150. When I was in Hong Kong last December I shot some footage with my GoPro camera as I walked around the streets of Wan Chai. I was in Final Cut tonight editing something else and found the clip, which I thought it might make an interesting GIF animation loop. I had no idea how to actually do that so of course I just Googled it. I figured out how to change the speed of the original clip, export the resulting frames out of Final Cut, open them as a sequence in Photoshop, convert to a Smart Object, reduce it in size from the original HD1080p video down to a 640px wide graphic, convert it to an adaptive dithered GIF and here's the end result.

141 - Drawing on Experience

Day 141. Today's create was made using an iPhone app called SketchVid. It lets you sketch over the top of a photo, and turns that sketch into a 15 second video file. I made three of them, editing them together using iMovie, then added some music and uploaded to YouTube using Google"s YouTube Capture app.

127 - Dash Cam-berra

Day 127. Spent the day in Canberra today at the AIS IT Managers Conference talking about our school's use of Google Apps for Education. On the way home I put my Nexus 5 in the dash cradle as usual, and just for something to do, turned on the LapseIt Pro app and set it to take one photo every 2 seconds. So this clip is the sped up version of the drive from Majura Road, Gungahlin to Lake George.

124 - In a Giffy

Day 124. Adam Pash, the past editor in chief of Lifehacker took a coding course recently and as a result put together a fun little site called And then I was Like. It enables the webcam on your computer and lets you take a "moving selfie". It's a bit of fun and will do for today's daily create.

112 - I'm No Dummy

Day 112. This fine piece of silliness was made using an iPad app called Morfo. It captures an image of your face, then allows you to map out the main features in order to animate it. Obviously it comes with a bunch of silly costumes, but the potential in the classroom is pretty interesting.

This was uploaded using the YouTube Capture app, with music added from the YouTube open music library.