GIF a Key Scene of a Screening Surveillance Film

This Make is opportunity to learn how to make an animated GIF from one of the Screening Surveillance short films using the Giphy Gifmaker. The process of choosing a segment of less than 10 seconds makes you focus on a key scene. The captions you add can add commentary or suggest an alternative narrative.

In these films, the protagonists are forced into situations by surveillance technologies. Here is an opportunity to imagine alternative paths of the plot if (a) characters made different choices or (b) the technology behaved in a different way. Or ponder what this might suggest for our post=pandemic future

These are the the films in the series

The third movie A Model Employee is too long to use with the web site, but if you have a Mac, try the Giphy Capture app that lets you record any screen action, add captions, and upload to Giphy.

Using Giphy GIF Maker

UPDATE:  Giphy GIF Maker no longer works for videos longer than 10 minutes, ruling out all three of our films! BOO GIPHY! As alternatives try one of the following (or see below for the desktop GIPHY Capture app)

• GIFs.com https://gifs.com/
• Make a Gif https://makeagif.com/youtube-to-gif
• Free Gif Maker http://freegifmaker.me/youtube-to-gif/

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It’s not required but if you think you might create more than just one GIF, you might want to create an account on giphy. This will make it easy to find all your creations, and it creates a nifty portfolio for you.

The Giphy GIF Maker allows you several ways to create animated gifs.

We use with the bottom option entering the URL for the YouTube link for one of the three films. Paste in the URL for it e.g. for the Blaxites film, we use the address https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1-ioR1Se14.

This brings up a (silent) view of the video. Use the Trim Video to select a portion of the video to make into a GIF. With giphy you can select up to ten seconds of any video clip to generate as a GIF (3-5 seconds is a better length to keep the file size smaller).

In the example below, we have zeroed in on the scene where the doctor slides Jai the box with a tracking device in it.

Use the bottom slider to select the start time of the GIF and the bottom one to pick it’s length. The preview will show you the loop for just this selection. Aim for the shortest length possible but also that makes use of the looping point to emphasize something important in the clip.

When the loop looks okay, click Continue to Decorate.

Here you can place a message or caption. Explore the different text styles and colors. Typically these must be short, but as shown above we can use a special trick. By breaking a message into multiple lines, and using the Old Switcheroo animation, we can make the text play out in segments, one line at a time.

Once your GIF looks complete, follow the button link for Continue to Upload.

Be sure to add netmirror tag as as one for the movie title, and make sure the public option is on. Then click Upload to Giphy.

 

Using Giphy Capture (Mac only)

For videos too long for using the Giphy GIF Maker on the web or to have more options for multiple captions, download the Giphy Capture app.

The app opens with a recording window that must be positioned and sized to the part of the screen to capture, in this case, a YouTube video.

Press record, click back to the browser window to make it active (pressing spacebar will start and stop the YouTube video as you cannot click the controls). The animated bar will indicated how much you can record (it’s not much). Click the red button again to stop.

A new clip will appear in the grey bar below. Click it to enter the editor.

 

Here you can trim the start and stop point as well as change a few other options. Experiment. Click the captions tab to add text.

 

While you have fewer formatting options here, in this app you can create multiple captions that can be set to appear at different points in your video. Click the Options tab again to access the controls that can let you save the animated gif as a file or upload to Giphy.

Make The GIFs!

Give it some time, when uploaded to Giphy, you will end up with a URL you can use to tweet, embed the GIF in your blog, and add below as a response to this Make.

Like these!

 

 

 

See what detail you can GIF from a Screening Surveillance video, and how you might do some “Old Switcheroo” on the plot. Or insert commentary, make inference to our current context.

Example for "GIF a Key Scene of a Screening Surveillance Film":
https://giphy.com/gifs/frames-evevator-netmirror-RLJxRDIDueNDTbjezR