Close Encounters and Contact: “My God”

Realized this might be a good place to share the originals for some new GIFs I've made in the last couple of days.

Image from Close Encounters of the Third Kind in which an eerie red light glows from within a keyhole in a door.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a wonderful movie for a hot summer night. I'm astonished at how well Steven Spielberg was able to capture the vibe. Making

GIFs from the movie is especially hard, given the limited color palette I was working with.

Animation from Close Encounters of the Third Kind in which an eerie red light glows from within a keyhole in a door.
Animations from Close Encounters of the Third Kind: A glowing alien space ship approaches a small child at a doorway.

video2gif commands

video2gif Close\ Encounters\ of\ the\ Third\ Kind\ \(1977\).mp4 ~/Downloads/close-encounters-3rd-kind-keyhole-glow.gif -s 51:11.25 -t 3.5 --saturation 1.333 --crop-h ih*0.7 --crop-w iw*0.7 -w 640 --contrast 1.3 --gamma 1.1

video2gif Close\ Encounters\ of\ the\ Third\ Kind\ \(1977\).mp4 ~/Downloads/close-encounters-3rd-kind-open-door.gif -s 51:22.8 -t 2 --saturation 1.333 --crop-w iw*0.7 --crop-h ih*0.7 -w 640 --contrast 1.3 --gamma 1.1


I went back to Contact to make a nice GIF of a short reaction that nevertheless lives rent-free in my head. This movie is great for evincing the human reaction in the face of the unknown, awe-inspiring, and numinous—which is great for overreacting on Twitter.

Animation from Contact: A man in a control center populated with military stands slowly and utters, "My God," as he stares into the far distance something glowing brightly off-camera.

video2gif command

video2gif /Volumes/Media/Movies/Contact\ \(1997\).mkv ~/Downloads/contact-my-god.gif -s 1:54:11.5 -t 2.1 --crop-w iw*0.6666 --crop-x 0 -V "Black" -F "SF Pro Text" -T "MY GOD" --gamma 1.2 --contrast 1.2 -w 640


I've made two recent breakthroughs in my video2gif technique:

  • I've realized that I can get HDR tonemapping working pretty well if I use this combination of options: --tonemap mobius --saturation 1.5. This seems to compensate pretty well for whatever I've messed up in my tonemapping code. The Predator GIF is a good example.
  • For captions, I've begun using the "Black" (heaviest) variant of the SF Pro Text font, which really pops against a busy GIF.

I did make a couple of other GIFs recently, so maybe I'll follow up on this post with a second one soon.