How to make the giffords by yourself (pt 1)

OK, now I'll tell you how I make giffords. Giffords is what I call animated gifs because that's funny to me.

After I tell you how to make the giffords, you can make em yourself. That is, unless you're scared! Or if you're a bummyass bum!
John Cale - Fear
Three 6 Mafia - Motivated


Sike, I'm just playing. Only do gifs if you want to!

Ok, the software I use is ImageJ, a Java-based image processing program developed by an NIH programmer named Wayne Rasband. You can download it for free at the ImageJ download page. There are versions for Mac, PC, and Linux, so you definitely make it work for you. Also: if you're using Linux, U R A NERD, so please give yourself a deeeep wedgie on my behalf.

For zero dollars, ImageJ is a powerful program for you to use. I've barely even grazed the tip of the iceberg with my pinkie toe, in terms of the potential power of ImageJ. If you're a pro computer-puter and can pute in Java, you can do a lot more than I'm doing now.


ImageJ is pretty intuitive and it has really good documentation, so I'm not going to go into a lot detail trying to explain everything.

So, I'm working with the built-in filters and features, plus a couple of plugins, of which there are over 300, all free. There are probably lots of plugins that would be fun that I haven't tried yet...
The most important plugins for me are: Animated Gif writer,Animated Gif reader,iMorph, Concatenator, Stack Reverser, and Expression.




So, when I make the giffords, I usually start with a Google Image Search, and try to find a good still picture. Then I open it in ImageJ, and turn it into an image stack, or in other words a movie. I often make stacks where it's the same picture throughout but then mess with it in order to have motion:


Here's a picture of Kathie Lee Gifford singing in front of an enormous Winnie the Pooh head. I turned it into a stack with iMorph (just morphing the original into itself) and then I made K.L. Gifford move with copy & pasting. And then I turned it into an animated gifford with Animated Gif writer! EASY!

Just don't watch K.L.'s horizontal scroll for too long or you will be hypnotized! I WARNED YOU! NOT MY FAULT!

Vybz Kartel - Hypnotized


Or this one started as a still from a Monday Night Football video game. I turned this one into a stack, did a selection around F. Gifford, and then used the median filter with increasing diameter in each frame, so he kind of melts. ALSO EASY!

Another way is to clip a little piece out of a movie file (preferably one with Juelz) and just turn that into an animated gif.

I got this video from the Frooty Looty Movie Goonie Loony Zooty Duty Hootie Shootie Bootie Agouti blog.

Question: Can you ever make the clock work for you so you can have enough time to get enough Santana?
Answer: NO! But we still have to try:

More time, more Juelz, more POWERFUL internet enrichment!s!!
Generating this power was very easy. I just took the first Juelz gifford , and then projected it in 3-D, which is a built-in ImageJ feature. If you want to, go to the Image menu, and then the Stacks sub-menu, and choose 3-D project, and then you can make a 3-D projection of whatever stack you want to (how the 3-D projection works is here ) . Back in the day, I used this trick to help explain the secret mystery secrets of the symbol by which the artist temporarily not known as prince was temporarily symbolized pictorially, when he was vocally described as "The Artist formerly known as Prince".

And so now you know enough to do the giffords yourself! OK?

But then if you wanna know how I do the wierd effects and stuff you may have noticed in some of the giffords I used in some of the more recent posts, you need to use my favorite plugin, Expression, which is good for doing math on images. There are a bunch of built-in formulas that come with the plugin that are good mostly for making abstract math-patterns, but I have some that I've written for making stuff in pictures do stuff. I'll talk about that in the next post.

UPDATE: That next post is up now.


Here's some giffords that I used the Expression plugin on:




And while we're speaking of Juelz, you should go to THe Smoking Section blog because they have all three installments of the Juelz'z Back Like Cooked Crack trilogy, and you need to download them if you have been sleeping, because clearly you have to awaken before it's too late.