elfs | Fisher Price's My First LJ Icon (Reply)

JWZ was one of the first people to originally mention the Orangina octopus somewhere where I could see it, although I didn't find the video until PZ Meyers pointed it out to me.

JWZ then issued a challenge to turn the squirting octopus scene into an LJ icon. I have, uh, attempted to rise to the challenge, and my contribution is visible there on the right. If you go to JWZ's LJ you'll see many worthy variations, although right now I'm holding out for

dossy's as the best so far.

To make this, I first cut it out with mplayer:

mplayer -vo png -ss 00:52 -endpos 00:56

Then created a common map with netpbm:

for i in *.png ; do pngtopnm $i > $i.pnm ; done pnmcat -lr 0*.pnm | pnmcolormap 48 > map48.pnm

Then created a collection of cut, scaled, and remapped gifs (I determined the dimensions of my cut with GIMP):

for i in *.png ; do pngtopnm $i | pnmcut -l 93 -t 34 -w 243 -h 243 | \
  pnmscale -xy 100 100 | pnmremap -mapfile=map48.pnm | \
 ppmtogif > ../$i.gif ; echo $i ; done

And then assembled them together with gifsicle:

gifsicle -d 24 --loop=forever -D bg -O2 *.gif > anim.gif

I did some judicious removal of frames with rm (I could always rerun the script to regenerate them) and it took a little tweaking, but comes in at 38,410 bytes. Because there are so many dropped frames, I slowed it down a little, from 160ms to 240ms. I think the frame jerkiness suggests watching something in slo-mo, and tweaking the speed emphasizes that, so the experienced viewer won't be annoyed by the painfully low frame rate.