The Gang of Five

Beyond the Mysterious Beyond => Hobbies and Recreation => Topic started by: LoyfeCycleProtector on February 14, 2016, 01:32:53 PM

Title: Gif Making
Post by: LoyfeCycleProtector on February 14, 2016, 01:32:53 PM
So I decided to replace my Ty Cobb gif with one more related to my name: the House of the Dead bosses, each named after a Tarot card. I had to hunt down an image of each boss during their ëweakness reveal’ sequence (and in the case of the Sun, I had to make it myself) and then trim and resize each image so they were all a similar dimension to my beloved Goldman greeting image. After that was done I had to upload them all to a gif maker and then bam: I have a nice gif of each boss.

But after staring at it for awhile I was dissatisfied with how a lot of the pictures looked: the names were all easy to read, but you often didn’t get a good look at the monster in some of the shots. Then I found out that for HotD 3 and 4 there were these ps3 achievement ëtrophies’ that were all high definition portraits of the bosses, and to my delight they were all the same dimension: 240 X 240, the same height as my other two signature images but short enough that it could fit without having to be moved to the row under it. So I set out on a quest to collect all those trophy images, and let me tell you: it was shockingly hard finding these things. Save for the trophy image of The Wheel of Fate, which was posted on the House of the Dead wiki, I had to search the far reaches of the web to locate these things. I eventually was able to find a Korean website that had all of the trophies from 4, so I grabbed all of those (btw, sorry if Justice spooks peopleóit wasn’t my idea to have such a close up shot of his face). The House of the Dead 3 trophies I knew existed, because I grabbed one of the Death images on a search and foolishly went to another search without checking the website was from. I tried looking around for the Fool and the Sun with no such luck, so I had to spend a good half an hour locating that Death image again which, to my relief, did indeed go to a website that had all the HotD 3 trophies.

That left 1, 2, and the magician’s boss fight from 4: Special. None of them had trophies, but they did have cool official artworks. The problem is that none of them were in that perfect 240x240 format, and I didn’t want to stretch them around too much so instead of trimming I resized their largest dimension to 240 pixels and then expanded the smaller dimension to 240 by carefully extending the frame on both sides of the image until they were even and then filled them in with black. The final Magician boss fight had neither a trophy or an official artwork, so I just used a cutscene image of him talking, and it just so happened than the best parts of the image fit beautifully into a 240x240 image.

So then that left making the gif, and that’s when I ran into some further troubles. When I first uploaded all the images to make the gif, I immediately noticed all the colors were faded in the final gif: while I’d later realize the same thing had happened to the first gif I made, I originally thought I had fiddled with the wrong lever while making the gif and that bled the colors, so I remade the gif. When I posted the two gifs together, I had originally envisioned them changing at the exact same time, so when people (namely myself) looked at it there’d be the named gif to the left and the high definition profile gif to right, but they weren’t in sync when I posed. They were off, and the longer the gifs ran the farther out of sync they became. At first I thought maybe it was because I used a different gif making site than the first one, so I went back to recreate the gif, but guess what? I couldn’t make anymore gifs that day. So, I had to wait until morning, watching the cringey synchronized gifs in the meantime, and when I finally got a chance I remade the second gif but with a little more delay too it and placed on the same website as the first. That only seemed to make it worse, so I figured I must have forgotten the timing I put for the first one.

Luckily, I wanted to remake the first gif anyway because of the crappy image I used for the Sun. So after watching an HD walkthrough and grabbing a good screenshot of that Boss fight, I remade the first gif, set it to the same timing as I did with the second, and voila! It worked! Now I can watch the line up of the House of the Dead bosses whenever I want!