Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

First off, wallabies are definitely cute and seem to be one of the few things in Australia that have neither the desire nor capability of killing you. They also seem pretty mellow, at least in places where they interact wtith people often. But they also seem like they really, really, really are hoping that they can some day achieve the status of kangaroo, despite the fact that they are, in fact, different animals. Or maybe it's just a version of "Roo-FOMO" where they imagine the kangaroos must be having a lot more fun than they are, when in reality, they're just sleeping. (It's likely that I didn't see any males, because they were all at the gym lifting weights, and would have probably beaten the shit out of me because of all the steroids they're taking.)

Anyway, I wanted to do something with a short 7-frame burst of pictures I took when a kangaroo was hopping around. I figured I could turn them into a simple animated GIF, but then what? Looking at the next picture after the hopping sequence, I noticed it was a bunch of wallabies looking blown away by something. The dialog is what I imagine they were saying.

I used convert from ImageMagick to create the animation and it was pretty straightforward. Then I put the wallaby picture into Photoshop, moved that to Illustrator, created the various speech balloons, sent it back to Photoshop, created single images for each speech balloon, saved them, scaled them down to 600x400 and rebuilt the GIF with some adjustments to the speech balloon timing a few times in ImageMagick. The GIF file is 2MB. The 1200x800 working version was almost 9MB and that's not full size.

I'm not sure how browsers will handle an animated GIF. I dislike animations going on an infinitely repeating loop, so you might need to refresh the page in the the browser (or even do a hard refresh, on Firefox it's the <control> key and the <F5> function key) to make it loop again.

I admit, the kangaroo does look rather poised and demure in the last picture.