Gumby's little sister: it's MINGA!

When dolls disagree (stop motion animation)

In trying to make one long gif out of a YouTube video of this doll fight sequence (NOT made by me, but by master dollmaker Maryna Bychkova), I ran into some problems. I had to divide it into two, which is awkward, though it's supposed to be one long sequence. It would only post at original size, which is huge, but at very low resolution. An experiment. I think this was made many years ago and is notable for the squares the dolls stand on, which is interesting because they are supposed to be able to stand alone.

Screenshots: Harold in stop motion

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This may not look like much to you (and, in fact, it isn't), but for me it represents something big: my first attempt to capture stills from video. I never even tried this for years, because every time I went on a site to find out how to do it, the instructions seemed more and more complex and full of bafflegab (not to mention contradictory, with everyone describing a different method). Then, bingo, I found a page today where you only have to highlight, copy, paste, and click. 

Et voila! You have a screenshot.

The thing of it is, though, that taking a series of screenshots and then putting them back together into an animation is kind of - well, it's a little redundant. An exercise, at best. I tell myself: honest to God, I can't help but learn something about REAL animation this way. But a gif would do just as well, wouldn't it? Or better.

But perhaps not. This way I can edit scenes, add characters, use title cards, include surreal images, and all manner of other stuff, once I know what I'm doing.

This is a kind of stop motion Harold cartoon. Claymation, if you will. His middle name was Clayton, after all. I have fantasies of manipulating this little clay figure, making him do things, even things he doesn't want to do. . . time to go to bed, Margaret.

A scary litttle Christmas

W'all, w'all, w'all (Jimmy Stewart festive stammer), usually this time of year I make gifs of weird, creepy or disturbing Christmas videos. Just the good bits. But not everyone likes gifs, and they don't always even run smoothly. They're being replaced by mp3 videos which are infinitely more sophisticated. But from the format of this blog, I think you can gather that I hate infinitely more sophisticated.

This year I'm posting whole videos. There's always the risk my zillions of readers won't bother to watch them (and with gifs, they don't have much choice: there they are, repeating, and repeating, and repeating). But some of these things cry out for context.

This is a harmless enough stop-motion video from the 1950s, and it used to run every year on public television. Kids looked forward to seeing it. The elves are cute enough, though Hardrock seems oddly named. Is there a cafe named after him, I wonder, or is he a hard rock musician, or what? The mystery is never solved.

But the reason I'm posting it under this Festival of Creepy Christmas Videos is that the Santa in this thing WON the First Annual Creepy Santa Smackdown in 2014 (which included gifs from all sorts of bizarre old cartoons and puppet shows from the '50s). That is, he won it in the first year. In the second year (link below), I found a whole bunch of new shit. I might re-run the whole post, which I don't like to do, but Lord-oh-Lord did it take a long time to make all those gifs!

(I just went back and looked at the actual post. He won in the second year, too.)

You're not going to believe or even comprehend the Santa in this thing. Why were so many children's programs so creepy back then, or were they maybe not creepy at all and our standards have changed?

You decide.
 

Second Annual Creepy Santa Smackdown!

(Read at your own risk.)

Catfall

NOTE. This is one of my gif animations, though I have to admit the images were sort of there already, borrowed from Google images. I guess you'd call this "fair use", like those ads with the animated raisins Maisie and Jake from the 1950s that show up on YouTube. I'm not quite clever enough to photograph falling cats this way, so I had to photoshop the cat at each pose on identical strips of black. This took a lot of experimentation and wasn't that smooth, due to being constricted to just five frames. Should I try again and make the cats closer together? Not sure it would make a difference. Anyway, here is the kitty falling at three speeds.

Before I dispense with this because it is becoming boring and I want to go to Piper Spit and feed blackbirds (which I never do), here's the cat falling over a shorter distance. This does show off the dramatic twist in the air which cats accomplish over very short distances, but it still isn't very smooth. Still, it's the best one yet.