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The hardest way to make a GIF

blog.willgrant.org

53 points by plaguna · 12 comments

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ticulatedspline

> Using imagemagick on the command line I was able to combine the images into a GIF.

man what a cop out, I was hoping they would use a text editor to build the gif. that would be way harder.

  • hereonout2

    Indeed, I've never developed my own film but I do respect it entails a fair bit of effort, and the funky old camera is cool.

    But scanning, cropping using one of the latest image editors, then running it through imagemagick does not feel like the hardest way to make a gif.

    • adzm

      Developing film is such a beautiful kind of magic. Watching the image appear in a darkroom before your eyes is a very unique experience.

  • helterskelter

    Yeah I was expecting somebody to build a gif by hand from the spec using ed.

  • DerivativeBS

    Yeah, real devs write their own LZW compression implementation from scratch in C++

virgil_disgr4ce

This reminds me in the best way of Lynch's Lumiere competition entry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds-OKH2ow4o

James333i

I was a little hoping you were going to hand deliver the film to a CVS and have it printed AND THEN scan it :)

As for imagemagick, you could make this harder by: a) Parsing the PNG structure of every image (4-byte length, 4-byte type, data, and 4-byte CRC). b) Decompress and unfilter the pixel data c) Convert data to indexed color and quantize down to <= 256 colors if needed d) Write the GIF container e) LZW-encode the pixel indices

dominicq

"Acquire photons" was funny

mxfh

No reference to Ulead GIF Animator? Was expecting some time travel step in between.

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