That’s so ravens

Since I couldn’t sleep, I decided to make something. I thought about playing with the Madden Giferator again, and making it do a Poe poem. I didn’t actually set out to do the obvious, but there was a Baltimore Ravens logo staring at me, so what the heck. After I made the string of GIFs, it occurred to me to make it a video. It would need some kind of soundtrack, so I googled raven music or something like that and found a track from The Alan Parsons Project Tales of Mystery and Imagination. I think I used to like APP back when I was ten. When I brought the GIFs into iMovie, they weren’t animated. I probably should have known that. I opened them all in Photoshop, changed the frame speed to .1 seconds and copied and pasted all the frames of each one so that they would all play through twice. Then I used the Export.Render Video function to convert them from GIFs to MP4s. If I was smart about it, I probably could have automated that entire process by recording a macro, but I’m not so I did them one by one. If I was smart I would know to close other programs before trying to use iMovie, but I’m not so I ended up having to power my laptop down when it froze and start over again a second time. I took the picture of Poe from the Wikimedia Commons and the logo came from the Brandon Ravens

Was it worth it? Doubtful, but it’s done. Maybe I should have used the same background, that first one, for all of them. It would be more consistent. One of the backgrounds has too much white in it and the type gets lost. Doubling the frames was unnecessary. The whole thing is pretty silly. I think the concept has possibilities, if there was a relationship between the story and the movements and the backgrounds, but other than the Raven connection this is just random. Another experiment done.