Night sky in 14 takes

I must be a frustrated animator, for every once in a while I am taken over by the urge to make something move.

I found a set of old photos of San Francisco, and wondered what I could do with them. This one seemed to have the least potential because it was relatively plain, but I thought I'd give it a go.

I ended up tinkering with it all evening. It turned out to be a very good subject because most of it was background or foreground. The building, figures and car were the filling in the sandwich and remained consistent while everything else changed. Black and white always works best for these gif-related experiments because figures stand out in a strange kind of 3D.

These started out fairly conservatively, then I got bored and started experimenting more with the foreground. Some of the animations wrapped around nicely. Some didn't come out as I designed them, at all. This is a primitive program, it's a Blingee, for God's sake, so it isn't supposed to be very sophisticated.

As I went on, these became stranger, then gloomier and more dystopian, and, finally, apocalyptic. As I finished this set, it struck midnight and I heard the most heart-chilling sound outside the window. It was pitch-black out there and raining hard. I heard a weird, trilling, screaming sound like something out of a horror-movie, a dozen different cold-blooded voices in an unhuman choir that isn't tame and doesn't belong in a city. I recognized it as the pack of coyotes that lurk and slink around singly during the day, then congregate at night to send up an unearthly squealing moan. This is why people still insist on believing in ghosts and demons and the supernatural. Weirdness surrounds us; it's just on the other side of the curtain.