GIFs

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.

Emily S

Jul 28, 2022 — 2 min read

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.

Wish Fulfillment

For October, I want to re-post this flash fiction short story I originally wrote on 3 September 2018, called “Wish Fulfillment.” I share it here in its original form. I was probably rewatching a lot of old Twilight Zone episodes around the time I wrote it, because I have a

Close up view of sunlight falling across the keys on a white, Mac-style mechanical keyboard

The writing app I want

I have a pretty clear idea of the writing app I want, and I don't think it exists. What I'm looking for is an app which lets me control a document's content, structure, and presentation separately from one another, at composition time. Usually, content,

A man laughingly accuses someone (offscreen) of being the devil, with a scolding wag of his finger

Twilight Zone: “You’re the Devil!”

It's cold, dark, and wintry just now, so obviously I'm watching old Twilight Zone episodes (from the original series run) to feel cheery and festive. In any case, I was watching the episode "Escape Clause" when I thought to GIF this brief reaction. video2gif

Irving tells his team (off-camera), “Let's burn this place to the ground.”

Severance: “Let's burn this place to the ground.”

Back in September, I rewatched Severance. I had intended to make more GIFs from this rewatch, but in the end, I only made a couple of Irving from the episode “Defiant Jazz.” I've included these below so you can download and reuse them. (Hotlinking would be rude, though.

video2gif commands

video2gif command

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