8. Growing Up

Craig's Animated Gif

I was very happy to see that Craig Osgood is keeping the art of the animated gif alive. It reminded me of some animated gif's that I made from photos of myself and put on my website many years ago. The other thing that it reminded me of the fact that I quite often seem to accidentally take a series of photos which, as I scan through them on the camera, are revealed to being an animation of one kind or another. Or in the case of this animation of Maggie and Arthur, the images are the result of what happens when you give your children permission to use your camera and they are left to make funny faces as they please. I didn't know that they had even taken these photos. I only stumbled upon the images later on while browsing through all my photos and decided that it would be fun to bring them to life.

Family Photos

The other place where these animated faces present themselves to me on a regular basis in within the "Faces" feature found in both iPhoto and Aperture. As you skim your pointer over the thumbnails of each person you are presented with a flip-book style animation of all the photos you have of that person within your photo library. When that person happens to be your own child with the photos dating from their birth to the present day, then what you get is a condensed history of that person's entire life. I have thought many times that I would like to turn this accidental discovery into a proper presentation and now, thanks to the inspiration from Craig's money growing on trees, I have. I took three individual screen captures while skimming through each child's photos within iPhoto and then cropped and assembled the results in Motion 5 together with a bit of decoration for good measure. You may have noticed from the result that it becomes apparent that my children are to be commended for putting up with the number of times that I have taken photos of them over the years, but then they are my favourite reasons for owning a camera so I must thank them profusely.