Sunday, November 3, 2013

So Close, and Yet, So Very Far.

2 comments:

  1. a question from avery big fan of your work , how to do a animted caption

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    1. I'm so glad you enjoy these captions!

      As to your question, there are a few ways to make animated captions—personally, I use Photoshop, as such:

      The first thing you need when making an animated caption is source material. In particular, what you need is called a .gif file. There are two ways to accomplish this: if you already have the animation you want to caption in .gif format, then this step is already done, and you can skip ahead to the next stage! If, however, you want to caption a clip from a movie or other video source, you'll first need to convert the file yourself. In Photoshop, this is accomplished by means of the "convert video frames to layers" tool, under "Import..." This brings up a box that will allow you to select the range of the video you'd like to turn into a gif. Just drag the start and end tabs to where in the video you'd like the .gif to start and end, and confirm the action.

      Now, whether you simply opened an existing .gif file or grabbed frames from video by the process described above, you should be looking at a huge, many-layered document. Each of these layers is one frame of the video.

      Our next step, then, is to add a caption. Because we want our caption to be visible on every frame, we're going to want to create a new, transparent layer on top of everything else. This is where we'll put our caption text. Once we've written what we like on the new, top layer, it should overlay every other layer—meaning it will appear in every frame.

      From here, we can save our project as a new .gif file using the "save for web" interface, and voila! We now have a moving picture with overlain text... that is, an animated caption.

      That's the gist of it anyway!

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