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!

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!

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.

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.

094 - The Blink of an Eye

Day 94. This little animation was made using an Android App called GIF Camera. Very simple to use. I quite literally learned how to use it in the blink of an eye.

077 - How Time Flies

Day 77. Stopframe animation of a clock. Time was running out to get today's create done so I took 10 stopframes of each numeral on our kitchen clockface using iMotionHD on the iPad, then saved it as an MP4 video file. But rather than a video which just plays once, I wanted it to loop over and over. So I found an app called GifBoom that converts video files to gifs and I got it posted just before midnight for today's daily create.

See how time flies when you're having fun?

Initially, when I posted this from Blogsy on the iPad, the animation didn't work. I had to log into GifBoom on my computer and find the actual embed code and update this post with that. Now it seems to work fine.