The Black Hole

Today’s Daily Create builds on a Mashable story about Roy Stryker’s ruthless editing practices. During the Depression, he headed the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration, where he was in charge of documentary photography. If he didn’t like a photo, he punched a hole through the negative. One of the first photos has a big black hole looming in the sky, so I immediately thought of Soundgarden’s old MTV hit:

so I thought I’d make the black hole sun set. I used the magic wand tool to select the black hole and copied it on to a new layer. Then I copied a chunk of sky and covered up the hole on my base layer. I moved the hole up to the top of the image. Then I duplicated the layer, moved it down a bit and increased the size a little. I repeated this a few times until I had a big black ball sinking below the horizon. For the last one I selected around the tree line and made a cut-out so that it looked like the ball was behind the trees.

I also wanted the scene to get progressively darker, so I duplicated the base layer and reduced the Brightness and Contrast a bit. I repeated that a few times so I had one base layer for each black hole. I merged the holes with their respective base layers and saved it as a GIF:

I thought it came out pretty well. I wondered about removing the sky and having the video play in the background, but that seemed like it would take some work. Alan approved of it:

Brilliant delivery, Mr Bond! I can hear Soundgarden (reminds me I heard a smooth jazz cover version while in Mexico) https://t.co/T7eRnRiLnc

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) April 26, 2016

so I wondered about putting sound with it. There are online tools that let you combine an online GIF with the sound from a Youtube video. It’s not quite the GIF with sound tool that Kelsey was looking for, but it fakes it well enough. I made one with the original song, then looked for a smooth jazz version. I also found a Paul Anka version just for fun. I suppose for it to really be smooth Kenny Loggins would have to be involved, but I couldn’t a Loggins version.