Weekend Special: Grand Canyon

People have been creating stereographic (3D) images for well over a hundred years. Here's a little gem I pulled from the Library of Congress and turned into a gif. Did you know that the LOC has thousands of photographs you can download digitally? Everything is in the public domain. Check it out: http://www.loc.gov/index.html It's a great reference if you're an artist or if you just like old stuff.

March is 3D month. Create your own 3D gif and email it to me and I'll post it on the blog. Click here for details.

The baby is keeping me up at night...

Guest Artist: Jake Wyatt

This post marks a milestone. I am proud to introduce our first guest artist... (cue trumpets) Jake Wyatt! Jake is a comic book fanatic, lover of literature, great storyteller, exceptional artist, and a true gentleman. He definitely ranks on my list of Top Ten People to Invite on a Road Trip. Someday we will all be watching his movies and yelling at our kids to put his comic books down and clean their rooms.


These gifs are snippets from a larger project yet to be unveiled. If you'd like to see more of Jake's work, visit his blog: http://jake-paperlife.blogspot.com/

Call for Entries: World Tour in 3D, Iconic Landmarks

Do you own a camera? Do you live somewhere? Could you borrow a camera? Could you go somewhere? If you can answer yes to two of these questions, you qualify to participate in the Wiggle Gif Around the World Event happening right here on The Radical Blog of Awesomeness in March 2011.

Recent innovations in gif technology now make it possible for anyone with a camera to capture a part of their world in 3D and post it on the internet for all to see. (hey that rhymes!) Here's how it works: you take your camera and find a place with a good foreground, middle-ground, and background. You take a photo and then lean slightly to one side and take another photo. You then make a gif that quickly toggles between these two photos. Voilà! You have just made a 3D image that anyone can view without the aid of glasses. Send me the gif, and I will post a new gif everyday in March.

So think of something iconic in your neck of the woods. A famous landmark, or something that makes your community unique. My goal is to have every continent represented. If you know someone in Antartica, please let me know!

Here's a link that describes in detail how to create a 3D wiggle gif. It does not require a fancy camera, just a little love and care. I will be taking entries between February 21 and March 1. Please email entries to 3DWorldTour@gmail.com. Gifs should be no larger than 300k. If you have trouble let me know. I can help or will even make the gif if you just email me the photos.

Peace

As always, please feel free to take these gifs and use them as you like, i.e. email, blog, website, etc.



This one's open to interpretation. I made it a month ago, and I'm still not exactly sure what it means. So let me know if you figure it out. Until then, have a gif day, and remember to be a peacemaker.

Tied to the tracks

Trains are very loud. If you have ever been talking on your cell phone or trying to have a conversation with someone near the tracks, you've probably been passed by this train.

Candy Hearts

This post is for all you lovers out there and especially to my sweetheart. I was going to make some bitter ones as well, but I ran out of time. Sorry, maybe next year. Until then, please enjoy these Valentine's Day gifs. They are dropped to white on the edges to facilitate delivery on white backgrounds.

Happy Valentine's Day! Boogie forever!

The Invisible Slide

When I was 4-years-old I had a dream...


In the dream I woke up in my bedroom. It was the middle of the night and everything was how it should be: the soft whirr of the air conditioning, the yellow light from the hallway filtering in through the not-quite-closed door, and the general sense that everyone else in the house was asleep. And that's when it hit me! Something was different. There was an invisible slide right there in the middle of my bedroom! I jumped out of bed, climbed the ladder to the top and slid down. It was magical because I could see right down to the carpet underneath me. Each time I went down the slide I landed a little closer to the wall until finally I slid right into the wall. Literally. I entered the wall and became part of its two-dimension universe. I couldn't turn my head. I could feel myself flattening. Time and space ceased to exist. My reality became a world of wallpaper, perpendicular lines of orange and blue on a tan background, extending out infinitely. And then I woke up.

Once again, please feel free to take these gifs and post them wherever you like. Check back next week for more gifs and for our first guest artist!

Never Ending Story

Stuck

I remember watching a commercial on TV when I was 4-years-old. A bunch of kids up in a tree house are looking at a map of a chocolate chip cookie like it's a minefield, strategically planning where they can take a bite and not eat a chocolate chip. Turns out that with Chips Ahoy, that's impossible.

This is the image that comes to mind every time I walk down the sidewalk in Brooklyn: a minefield. Do this many people chew gum? And does everyone just spit it out on the sidewalk? Gross!

Did somebody say pizza?

It's Friday night. You're sitting at home - alone and bored. "Where's the party?" you ask yourself incredulously. And that's when inspiration carries you away on its wings. You post this GIF to Facebook and reach for the phone. The pizza guy is on his way, and you know that when your friends see this bubbling mass of molten mozzarella, missing this party will not be an option.

jumping high five, freeze frame.

Books

I made this one the other night while watching a bio on Metallica. I write this only in the hope that some Metallica fans are going to get google-duped into visiting this page. If that's you, welcome! Next GIF on Monday. Have a great weekend.

And they spoke their first words...

Tribute

Hello friends.

Is anyone else a little stunned that this URL was still available?

Well, I've finally found my calling in life. I was born to be a GIF artist. Every day I'm going to post a new animated GIF to this site. Today I'm appropriating my imagery, but check back tomorrow for some 100% Grim Photos. I'd also love to have maybe a weekly GIF contest or feature some guest artists.

In launching this blog devoted to GIFs, I thought I'd start out with a tribute to the great animators who have gone before. This first post is an homage to one man who has inspired us all: To the man who gave us for 25 minutes of uncompromised entertainment and then taught us a moral lesson. To the man who taught us that you don't stab people with a sword, but that you use a sword to hit other swords and to deflect lasers and sonic waves from magic spells. To the man whose very goodness exceeds the evilness of Evil himself (I'm not making this up, go watch the show if you have not seen this episode). For crushing the boundaries between Sci-Fi and Fantasy with probably a boulder you threw with your bare hands, this one's for you He-man!





Take these GIFs and post them everywhere! On emails, Facebook, other blogs, where ever you can make them stick. Anything I make for this blog is fair game (just don't tell the people at Filmation, they will sue my pants off). Check back tomorrow for another GIF!