Category Archives: drawing

Solving the registration issue for kids making GIFs on phones

A friend has been home-schooling her talented eight year-old granddaughter during the pandemic and asked me to help her with an art project. We met briefly, in a park, during the height of the pandemic, where I showed them how to do it, explaining the general principle of stop-motion animation, but it was a quick and uninspiring demonstration.

There was also the difficult to solve problem of how to line up the frames properly so that they’d make an effective phone gif. If the frame is not completely steady from frame to frame, the moves will be out of registration and not produce a watchable gif. I had to basically invent a rig to keep the frames steady when I launched a non-profit kids’ animation workshop almost a decade ago, but even with that rig there are technical hurdles to getting perfectly registered frames.

Now that we are all vaccinated I can go in person and work directly with the young artist, help her go wild with her eight year-old creativity. In the meantime, I promised my friend I’d send her a little kit to let the girl start making gifs herself.

The challenge remained, how to give them a foolproof way to properly register the frames so the gifs would work. Particularly for someone using a cellphone camera and without the steady little rig I’d put together over the course of months of trial and error.

I solved it late last night. Check out the gif below and see if you can see my fix.

Letter from an American antifascist

Knut Wilson was a volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, part of the international force (speaking 54 languages) that went to Spain to fight the rise of fascism. Wilson, an American Black who would have been eligible to serve in the segregated US army that later fought the racist Hitler regime, was the head mechanic for the international garage that maintained all of the brigade’s fighting vehicles.

Back in 1938 people who fought fascism were seen by many as heroes. A little fact important to remember when our most recent ex-president has tried, in literally every way possible, to be a fascist leader. He endlessly vilified and condemned anti-fascist groups in the US, while supporting violent white supremacist paramilitary groups, hmmmm… To paraphrase a powerful moron, I prefer presidents who condemn fascism.

This section of Knut Wilson’s letter home was read by Robert Evans, one of the best reporters out there, giving some historical perspective on fascist insurrections in a series called Behind the Insurrection. You can hear the most recent segment of it here, the section this quote is taken from begins at 1:05:37. This quote above begins at 1:09:23.

American Blacks and Jews (10% of the Lincoln Brigade were American Jews) intimately understood the relation between fascism and murderous racism. As I keep trying to point out, violent racism IS THE SAME THING EVERYWHERE, throughout history. A tool of the unscrupulous slave-holder types who require masses of people to take their anger, frustration and hatred out on somebody besides them. If the oppressed ever united and got real political power, the slave-holder types would be toast. Fortunately for them, few things stir the blood more than a good appeal to hatred and fear and a wild racial massacre.