I thought I was going to struggle with this assignment because I don’t record videos very often. However, I quickly realized that this isn’t true at all because I have heaps of video footage of my pets. I actually took this video just a few weeks ago while my dog, Roxie was playing. Even though she’ll be 11-years-old in August, I’ve been working a lot with her recently to try to teach her some good behaviors. For instance, if we go on walks on the road, I’ve trained her to stay on my left so she isn’t walking into oncoming traffic, which is a big deal because she used to do a lot of swerving. In this video, I was trying to get her to bring her toy back to me. She likes to play fetch, but she isn’t well known for returning a toy after it’s thrown, which kind of defeats the purpose of the game. She’s been doing really well, so I wanted to capture her progress while we were playing the other day.

Making this video into a GIF was so much harder than it probably should’ve been. I originally had over 30 seconds of footage, which I knew I’d have to cut down. I wound up with 8 seconds of footage for a while, which I completely edited and tried to optimize to be as small as possible, but it just wasn’t happening. I tried a bunch of programs too, and in all of them I’d get to a point where I could finalize and save the GIF, but then something would go wrong. Usually, I found out that the program I was trying to use wasn’t actually free, despite how it was marketed, and required a subscription before I could save anything. Eventually, I realized that if I just used a shorter clip and cropped out the unnecessary parts of the video, the program EZGIF would work perfectly. Once I had a base, I added some text with some cute emojis to frame it, and I was done. I’m very happy with how it turned out, and I’m glad I trimmed and cropped the video because the GIF ended up being a lot less shaky overall.

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