How to Make a GIF Animation Using GIMP and Poser (Tutorial)

How to Make a GIF Animation Using GIMP and Poser (Tutorial)

Une image vaut mille mots – French saying

The purpose of the present simple tutorial is to explain how to make a GIF animation using popular software like Poser and Gimp. GIF, defined as Graphics Interchange Format, are images that used to make small film clips or animations. These images, often small in size and restricted in color pallette available, are looped forever and can keep moving either on the Internet or even, in certain cases, on your computer. While they look like one image, if you download a GIF animation, you will see that the image has several frames. The number of frames may vary from two to so many that it slows down their apparition. Resolution may not be ideal in GIF images, but they remain very catchy and decorate many a Website.

Thus, GIMP – the GNU Image Manipulation Program is a free and open source program similar in its features and capabilities to the professional software produced by the Adobe Creative Suite – Photoshop. Unlike Photoshop, GIMP is free and open source, thus it has a completely different license, its code can be studied and it can be downloaded for free from the GIMP Website or elsewhere on the Internet.

GIF animation. Created with GIMP and Poser (30 frames/layers, 100 milliseconds delay). Image source: Elena

Alternatively, Poser is a commercial animation, modelling and rendering program, which allows content creation. A similar free program is Daz Studio, but Daz Studio has a completely different commercial proposition, since while it can be downloaded for free, the figures or characters (or actors) must usually be bought separately. Conversely, while several additional bundles are available for Poser, the software comes with an integrated content library, complete with figures, props, scenes, poses, expressions and so on.

Therefore, to make a simple GIF animation it is convenient to use both programs. For example, you choose a figure in Poser, customize it to your liking and add animation. To achieve an animated sequence, you customize the figure on scene 1 (the number of scenes is specified on the bottom of the window). Then, if you want the camera to move, you go to the last scene and move the camera. The rest (the movement) will be taken care by the software itself.

Additionally, to have the figure chosen (the primary actor) move, you may move them (translate/pull object) yourself, or add one of the built-in animations available in the library. Pressing play in Poser will show you how the animation looks. While it is possible to make videos in Poser, the present tutorial concentrates on GIF animations. Hence, then you would go to “Make Movie” and change the settings to Render as Images (make sure the Render Settings are specified as FireFly and not Preview). Depending on the number of frames you have, the rendering of all the images may take quite a while. To save time, it may be wise to change the size to Half instead of Full. The rest is a matter of patience.

Furthermore, part two – GIMP. GIMP is a very user friendly program, simple to use and with many tutorials available on the Web on how make banners and other CGI (computer generated imagery). GIMP is also used to add text, transparent watermarks and, of course, photo editing. Hence, now it is the time to create the GIF animation. Simply open GIMP and open the first image. Then, go to Layers and Open as Layers the second image. The process is repeated with every single frame, or layer as it becomes in GIMP. To view your animation in GIMP, you would go to Filters –> Animation –> Playback.

Once you are satisfied with the result, you Export the image. To save it as a GIF animation, you would manually change the format extension to .gif instead of .png or .jpg. A window will pop up and it is important to check Save as Animation. Depending on whether you want to slow or speed up your animation, you would specify the desired milliseconds between frames. Finally, to verify whether everything worked, you can open the newly generated GIF animation and use the same method described above to play it. Once it is done, it can be uploaded to a Website, a blog or perhaps even to social media, although some social networking Websites only show GIF animations in static manner.

Jewelry

Jewelry

Over time, jewelry has often been associated with courtship, romance and love. Gems and adornments are likewise linked to marriage, through the exchange of first engagement, and then marital, rings.

The most precious metals on planet Earth include rhodium, platinum, gold and silver. As a rule, the more rare the metal in nature, the highest its price (due to scarcity). Interestingly, silver has played protective roles in mythology and folklore, such as being dangerous to werewolves. Also, several accounts exist about the nature of Silver Elves. Additionally, throughout history, gold has been used to back up a country’s currency. When it comes to rhodium, in a post-Charlie Sheen episode of American sitcom Two and a Half Men, the ring that ties Ashton Kutcher’s character to his ex-wife is made of rhodium.

A Gothic porcelain doll wearing a black pearl necklace. Perhaps, the raven’s wing, black hair, apparel and make-up convey a Gothic allure of the Morrigan. Image: Copyright © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Aside from metals, there are also precious and semiprecious stones. Customarily, the most valuable stones in the world are diamonds, sapphires, rubies and emeralds. Gemstones amber, aquarium, amethyst, pink quartz, white crystal, onyx and garnet are only semi-precious. Diamonds and quartz are likewise used in industry, such as electric tools, lights or watches. Naturally, watches can be remarkable pieces of jewelry. Precious and semi-precious jewels, as well as other ornaments, have often been of interest in magic (fantasy) literature. Crafted works can gain international fame, like artfully encrusted Faberge eggs.

Finally, diamonds and pearls come in almost all shapes and sizes – white, black, blue, pink, etc. Whether diamonds do indeed cut glass has been suggested as a bad way of testing the rocks. By and large, the value of such a rock coincides with its number of carats, clarity, color and absence of any flaws.

Petard: A Tale of Just Deserts

Petard: A Tale of Just Deserts

By Cory Doctorow

Kickstarter? Hacker, please. Getting strangers to combine their finances so you can chase some entrepreneurial fantasy of changing the world by selling peole stuff is an idea that was dead on arrival. If your little kickstarted business is successful enough to compete with the big, dumb titans, you’ll end up being bought out or forced out or sold out, turning you into something indistinguisable from the incumber businesses you set out to destroy. The problem isn’t that the world has the wrong kind of sellers; it’s that it has the wrong kind of buyers. Powerless, diffused, atomized, puny, and insubstantial.

Turny buyers into sellers and they just ed up getting sucked into the logic of fail : it’s unreasonable to squander honest profits on making people happier than they need to be in order to get them to open their wallets. But once you get all the buyers together in a mass with a unified position, the sellers don’t have any choice. Businesses will never spend a penny more than it takes to make a sale, so you have to change how many pennies it takes to complete the sale.

Petard, a tale of just deserts. Photo by Elena

Back when I was fourteen, it took me ten days to hack together my first Fight the Power site. On the last day of the fall term, Ashcroft High announced that catering was being turned over to Atos Catering. Atos had won the contract to run the caf at my middle school in my last year there, and every one of us lost five kilos by graduation. The French are supposed to be good at cooking, but the slop Atos served wasn’t even food. I’m pretty sure that after the first week they just switched to filling the steamer trays with latex replicas of gray, inedible glorp. Seeing as how no one was eating it, there was no reason to cook up a fresh batch every day.

The announcement came at the end of the last Friday before Christmas break, chiming across all our personal drops wih a combined bong that arrived an instant before the bell rang. The collective groan was loud enough to drown out the closing bell. It didn’t stop, either, but grew in volume as we filtered into the hall and out of the building into the icy teeth of Chicago’s first big freeze of the season.

Junior high students aren’t allowed off campus at lunchtime, but high school students – even freshmen – can go where they please so long as they’re back by the third-period bell. That’s where Fight the Power came in.

Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton, Prime Books, 2015.

Synergism

Synergism

In the 19th century, by the mid-sixties, creative entrepreneurs had discovered that growth was a word and the word was synergism.

Synergism in the quality of having 2 plus 2 equal 5. Thus, it seemed quite plausible that two separate companies with an earning power of $2 million each might produce combined earnings of $5 million if the business were consolidated. This magical, mystical, surefire profitable new creation was called a conglomerate.

Part of the genius of the financial market is that if a product in demanded, it is produced. The product that all investors desire is expected growth in earning per share; and if growth isn’t to be found in a name, it is only to be expected that someone would find another way to produce it. The market always shakes off its losses and settles down to ponder its next move, which is not too long in coming.

In the U.S., while antitrust laws keep large companies from purchasing firms in the same industry, it is possible to purchase firms in other industries without interference from the Justice Department. These consolidations are carried out in the name of synergism. Ostensibly, mergers would allow the conglomerate to achieve greater financial strength (and thus greater borrowing capabilities at lower rates); to enhance marketing capabilities through the distribution of complementary product lines; to giver greater scope to superior managerial talents; and to consolidate, and thus make more efficient, operating services such as personnel and accounting departments. All this led to synergism – a stimulation of sales and earnings for the combined operation that would have been impossible for the independent entities alone.

Synergism. Photo d'Elena.

In fact, the major impetus for the conglomerate wave of the 1960s, for example, was that the acquisition process itself could be made to produce growth in earnings per share. Indeed, the managers of conglomerates tended to possess financial expertise rather than the operating skills required to improve the profitability of the acquired companies. By an easy bit of legerdemain they could put together a group of companies with no basic potential impulse.

The trick that make the game work is the ability of the company to swap its high-multiple stock for the stock of another company with a lower multiple. For example, a type-writer company can only “sell” its earnings at a multiple of 10. But when these earnings are packaged with the electronics company, the total earnings (including those from selling type-writers) could be sold at a multiple of 20. And the more acquisitions a synergetic company can make the faster earnings per share will grow and thus the more attractive the stock will look to justify its high multiple.

The whole thing is like a chain letter – no one would get hurt as long as the growth of acquisitions proceed exponentially. Of course the process can not continue for long, but the possibilities are mind-boggling for those who get in at the start. It seems difficult t believe that Wall Street professionals could be so myopic as to fall for the conglomerate con came, but accept it they did for a period of several years. Or perhaps as subscribers to the caste-in-the-air theory, they only believed that other people would fall for it.

There were a lot of monkey-shines practiced in the 60s, that could be described as the standard conglomerate earnings “growth” gambit. Convertible bonds (or convertible preferred stocks) are often used as a substitute for shares in paying for acquisitions. A convertible bond is an IOU of the company, paying a fixed interest rate, that is convertible at the option of the holder into shares of the firm’s common stock. As long as the earnings of the newly acquired subsidiary were greater than the relatively low interest rate that was placed on the convertible bond, it was possible to show even more sharply rising earnings per share. This is because no new common stocks at all had to be issued to consummate the merger, and thus the combined earnings could be divided by a smaller number of shares.

It is hard to believe that investors did not count the dilution potential of the new common stock that would be issued if the bondholders of preferred stockholders were too convert their securities into common stock. Indeed, as a result of such manipulations, corporations are now required to report their earnings on a “fully diluted” basis, to account for the new common shares that must be set aside for potential conversions. But most investors in the second half of the 20th century ignored such niceties and were satisfied only to see steadily and rapidly rising earnings.

(Based on A Random Walk Down Wall Street, including a life-cycle guide to personal investing, by Burton G. Malkiel, 1973. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.)

Automatic Sprinkler Corporation

Automatic Sprinkler Corporation

In the 1960s, one company was truly creative in financing its acquisition program. It used a convertible preferred stock that paid no cash dividend at all (convertible preferred stock is similar to a convertible bond in that the preferred dividend is a fixed obligation of the company. But neither the principal nor the preferred dividend is considered a debt, son your company can usually skip a payment with greater freedom. Of course, in this example, the stock paid no cash dividend at all). Instead, the conversion rate of the security was to be adjusted annually to provide that the preferred stock be convertible into more common shares each year. The older pros in Wall Street shook their heads in disbelief over these shenanigans.

Automatic Sprinkler Corporation (later called A-T-O Inc. and later still, at the urging of its modes chief executive officer Mr. Figgie, Figgie International) is a good example of how the game of manufacturing growth was actually played during the 1960s. Between 1963 and 1968, the company’s sales volume rose by over 1,400 percent. This phenomenal record was due solely to acquisitions. In the middle of 1967, four mergers were completed in a twenty-five-day period. These newly acquired companies were all selling at relatively low price-earnings multiples, and thus helped to produce a sharp growth in earning per share. The market responded to this growth by bidding up the price-earnings multiple to over 50 times earnings in 1967. This boosted the price of the company’s stock from about $8 per share in 1963 to $73 5/8 in 1967.

Mr. Figgie, the president of Automatic Sprinkler, performed the public relations job necessary to help Wall Street build its castle in the air. He automatically sprinkled his conversations with talismanic phrases about the energy of the free-form company and its interface with change and technology. He was careful to point out that he looked at twenty to thirty deals for each one he bought. Wall Street loved every word of it.

Chinatown Old Buildings. Photo by Elena

Mr. Figgie was not alone in conning Wall Street. Managers of other conglomerates almost invented a new language in the process of dazzling the investment community. They talked about market matrices, core technology fulcrums, modular building blocks, and the nucleus theory of growth. No one from Wall Street really knew what the words meant, but they all got the nice, warm feeling of being in the technological mainstream.

In the 60s conglomerate managers found a new way of describing the business they had bought. Their shipbuilding businesses became “marine systems.” Zinc mining became the part of the “protective services division.” And if one of the “ungentlemanly” security analysts (somebody from CCNY rather than Harvard Business School) had the nerve to ask how you can get 15 to 20 percent growth from a foundry or a meat packer, the typical conglomerate manager suggested that his efficiency experts had isolated millions of dollars of excess costs; that his marketing research staff had found several fresh, uninhabited markets; and that the target of tripling profit margins could be easily realized within tow years. To this add talk of breakfast and Sunday meeting with your staff, and the image of the hardworking, competent, go-go atmosphere is complete.

Instead of going down with merger activity, the price-earnings multiples of conglomerate stocks rose higher and higher. Prices and multiples for a selection of conglomerates in 1967 are shown in the following table:

Security, 1967 (high prices, price-earnings multiple), 1969 (low price, price-earnings multiple)

• Automatic Sprinkler (A-T-O Inc.) 73 7/8; 51,0. 10 7/8, 13.4
• Litton Industries 120 1/2, 44.1; 55, 14.4
• Teledyne Inc. 71 1/2, 55.8. 28 1/4 14.2
• Textron, Inc. 55. 24.9. 23 1/4, 10.1.

The music slowed drastically for the conglomerates on January 19, 1968. On that day, the granddaddy of the conglomerates, Litton Industries, announced that earnings for the second quarter of that year would be substantially less than had been forecast. It had recorded 20 percent yearly increases for almost an entire decade. The market had so thoroughly come to believe in alchemy that the announcement was greeted with disbelief and shock. In the selling wave that followed, conglomerate stocks declined by roughly 40 percent before a feeble recovery set in.

Worse was to come. In July, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it would make an in-depth investigation of the conglomerate merger movement. Again the stocks went tumbling down. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the accounting profession finally made their move and began to make attempts to clarify the reporting techniques for mergers and acquisitions. Perhaps weak parts do not a strong whole make. The sell orders came flooding in. These were closely followed by new announcements from the SEC and the Assistant Attorney General in charge of antitrust, indicating a strong concern about the accelerating pace of the merger movement.

The aftermath of this speculative phase revealed two disturbing factors. First, conglomerates were mortal and were not always able to control their far-flung empires. Indeed, investors became disenchanted with the conglomerate’ new math; 2 plus 2 certainly did not equal 5 and some investors wondered if it even equaled 4. Second, the government and the accounting profession expressed real concern about the pace of mergers and about possible abuses. These two worried on the part of investors reduced – and in many cases eliminated – the premium multiples that had been paid for the anticipation of earnings from the acquisition process alone. This in itself makes the alchemy game almost impossible, for the acquiring company has to have an earnings multiple larger than the acquired company if the ploy is to work at all.

The combination of lower earnings and flattened price-earnings multiples led to a drastic decline in the prices of conglomerates, as the preceding table indicates. It was the professional investors who were hurt the most in the wild scramble for chairs. Few mutual or pension funds were without large holdings of conglomerate stocks. Castles in the air are not reserved as the sole prerogative of individuals; institutional investor can build them, too. An interesting footnote to this episode is that by the 1980s deconglomeration came into fashion. Many of the old conglomerates began to shed their unrelated, poor-performing acquisitions in order to boost their earnings.

Many of these sales were financed through a popular innovation of the 1980s, the leveraged buyout (LBO). Under an LBO the purchaser, often the management of the division assisted by professional deal makers, puts up a very thin margin of equity, borrowing 90 percent or more of the funds needed to complete the transaction. The tax collector helps out by allowing the bought-out entity to increase the value of its depreciable asset base. The combination of high interest payment and larger depreciation charges ensures that taxes for the new entity will remain low or nonexistent for same time. If things go well, the owners can often reap windfall profits. William Simon, a former secretary of the Treasury, made a multimillion-dollar killing on one of the earliest LBOs of the 1980s, Gibson Greeting Cards. The LBO wave accelerated dramatically during the late 1980s. Of course if economic conditions turn sour, the high interest costs are likely to place the new entity in considerable financial jeopardy. The early 1990s witnessed the financial fallout from the explosion of some of the most poorly considered leveraged buyouts, conceived during the 1980s.