“Blackbird fly…”

For today’s Daily Create we had to “Remix the Twitter Bird into an unusual location.” The bird led to The Birds, naturally, and no doubt inspired by gifmaster Michael Branson Smith’s Hitchcock effort. When I googled the Twitter logo and found a black PNG of the bird, the deal was sealed. I looked for The Birds gifs, and found the one I used on Giphy. It had twelve frames, so I didn’t think it would be too bad to work with. I selected the first frame and pasted in the logo, which created a new layer between the first and second. I scaled the bird down to a small size and moved it back by the house. Then I duplicated the layer, moved the duplicate above the second layer, scaled the bird up a little and changed its position slightly. I repeated this process ten more times, so I had a bird for each layer, and together they create the illusion of the bird flying forward. I ended up with a Layers palette like this:

Then I merged each Layer 13 copy with the layer below it, and Saved for Web as a gif. Apparently when I scaled the bird down in the first place, it lost the original pixel information, so each time I enlarged it, it became more and more fuzzy. I didn’t expect that, but I think it works. If it was sharp and in focus, it wouldn’t fit in as well with the other birds.

And as I was writing this, my Daily Create inspired the inspirer:

.@phb256 your Hitchcock inspires another @ds106dc #tdc1686 #ds106 pic.twitter.com/Xv5uljoGBq

— Michael B Smith (@mbransons) August 20, 2016

And that’s the magic of ds106!