I've been wanting to change up my blog header on Silents and Talkies for a while. For a few years I've had a still of Monica Vitti from Modesty Blaise, which I loved, but it was time for something new. Still Monica Vitti, though, haha.
When I started this I wasn't actually sure if animated gifs were even possible for headers on Blogger, so I uploaded a tester gif and tried it out on Safari, Firefox, and Chrome. They all worked so I took the plunge and started hours, and hours, and hours of work on this. If you're interested in knowing a bit about the process, keep reading! :)
I knew that I wanted to use video from L'Avventura, so I found the clip that I wanted from the DVD, ripped it to my computer, and then narrowed it down to a fraction of a second in Quicktime. Then I imported the video frames as layers in a Photoshop document. Then I used this tutorial for creating a cinemagraph, which is basically an animated gif in which only one part of the image is moving. Monica Vitti turns her head slightly in the clip that I chose, so I masked off everything except for her hair. I had to use the puppet warp tool to make sure that her ear and hairline were lining up in each frame, and then I used my tablet to carefully erase the background.
This is one of those rare instances where the finished product came out even better than I imagined! I'm so happy with it!
