Challenge: Muybridge bird!

So here is the challenge. I've been experimenting with making little animations, flip-books or whatever you want to call it, on my gif program. Easy enough to do, but the only photos in sequence I can find are Muybridge animal/human studies. 

So what you do is start with this, a whole lot of small black-and-white photos on a gridwork background.

Then you start copying them. You'll need, for this one, only twelve copies. Then you crop out each individual photo from the sheet, and number it. 

Okay.

(some time later)

What you have is. . . 

And what you finally have is:

Not the smoothest animation, but flight is harder to capture somehow. A running animal seems to give the eye a sense of continuity, so that we fill in the missing frames. This one, well. . . It doesn't have the continuous motion of a horse running along a track, that sense of endlessness, since flight is so erratic and moves upward. But all things considered, it was a pretty boring and nearly pointless exercise in Muybridge animation.

Should I try a little naked running man, next?

The Muybridge jumping horse: look what I did!

This was an experiment in Muybridge animation, which is certainly not a new idea. Most of the Muybridge photos display all the frames consecutively, which is (I think) the way most people would view them. Putting them together into a sort of primitive motion picture came much later.

Well, this is my attempt, and a pretty good one I think, at taking one of these sheets of tiny photos - this one, to be specific:

. . . cropping the little square photos into - little square photos, and putting it all together with Makeagif, which will take any sequence of photos (who knows how many) and make a teeny-tiny slide show out of it.

The motion here is actually not too bad. The square photos made the cropping less tedious than you'd think (considering I had to do it 12 times).

But there are some strange things about this little photographic cartoon from the 1880s. The fact that the rider appears to be nude isn't so unusual, nor is the fact that he's not using a saddle. Muybridge liked his models (male or female) to show lots of skin, not for prurient reasons but to display natural skeletal and muscular movement without impediment.

No, it's that jump. The horse seems to jump over it before it appears. Something strange going on here. People often accused Muybridge of "fiddling", tweaking his images somehow to impress the public, and he really wasn't a scientist or an inventor - not at the start, anyway. But then, neither was Edison.

Maybe it's just the way I'm seeing it. Maybe it's the way I cropped the photos (but since they were all perfectly square, that part of it was relatively easy).

Anyway, I was all set to go watch TV or go on Facebook or do some other moronic thing, when I looked at the Muybridge images again and noticed how many exotic animals he had forced to walk through all those elaborate tripwires. Including. . . one of my favorite animals of all time, the capybara!

Yes, the Muybridge capybara. This is what I found:

This is what the photos looked like, copied and cropped apart 4" x 3":

. . . and here is the finished gif, spliced together by my magic Makeagif program:

He's a little drunken, a little wobbly, but then he's about 130 years old, and photographed with the most primitive equipment imagineable. And it's really not bad, for only nine frames a second.

"Because it's 2015!" (shrug)

 

One of those bored/boring days

   

I never do this, I mean make gifs out of still photos, mainly because this is the slowest speed I can display them in. But I've found a whole lot of interesting cloud formation pics - I told you it was a bored, boring day, a relentlessly dark Vancouver-rainish day when I don't want to get out of my fleece nightie and knee socks EVER (and might not, though I am not sick).

I have seen blobs of rainbow in Hawaii, while driving down the road from Hana, and I actually thought I was seeing things because I didn't think rainbows "came" that way. These were strange globes of colour that seemed to be snagged between bright cumulus clouds. A little rain was falling from somewhere. Some of the rainbow blobs appeared to be sitting on the ground, or perhaps on the side of the mountain. It was weird. Now I know a whole lot of things are possible, though I refuse to go into meteorological explanations as to what's happening when you see a funny-looking cloud.

I should do a bunch of these, why not? It's raining too hard to go out.

Sorry about that: or, Justin Trudeau Blingee No. 2

   

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that Bling(ee)