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Birth of an Icon
Jan. 8th, 2009 08:31 pmI've just entered the irredeemable area of animated icons, and though I know making a post about the fact is unimaginably pathetic, I was honestly surprised that all the elements came together to work.
I'd been meaning to have a go at animating my Prince icon for a while, but I never got around to it because I thought I would have to eliminate it first (reverting all the posts I'd made with it to the default icon) and then put up the new one. Not that this would have been a huge problem, as I don't really use the one of my head any more because it's nearly five years old now. Come to think of it, the symbols on my default one mean very little now, too. How tragic. But still, I don't know what I'd replace them with - it was difficult enough coming up with six in the first place, and I don't think I'm quite ready to use the rabbit avatar here just yet.
The frames from the Prince and Jafar's epic battle animation - there are only six of them, which surprised me given the apparent smoothness - were taken from a Youtube video of the end of the last level so that I didn't have to organize recording them from DOSBox myself. This resulted in an odd roundabout way of capturing the video on the screen with a fixed 100x100 area on CamStudio, then opening that and pasting the frames into Paint.NET so that I could line them all up correctly. I then used a little program that I'd found a while ago called UnFREEz to compile the individual GIFs into an animation.
The most trickery was needed when actually uploading it -![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
stubbleupdate had told me that if you upload an icon with the same tag as an existing one, then the old one will be shifted out to a new name and the new one will take its place. However, if you've already reached the icon limit as I had, then the upload form is disabled entirely, so you can't even replace them. I got around this by upgrading momentarily to a Plus account and hoping nobody would notice, then replacing the icon, deleting the static one, and switching back to a normal account again. And there it is.
I had thought that there was a 10KB size limit on Livejournal icons, but I couldn't find any mention of a cap when I looked it up just now - either way, this one's about 25KB and it worked fine. If you find it supremely irritating, then don't worry, as I'm sure the novelty will wear off in about a week.
Next stop: Editing it so that they're fighting with kippers.
Actually, one hour later, image editing fever's already taken me and I came up with this demonstration of the Prince and Jafar sorting out the Princess's marriage with a rather more peaceful contest.
I'd been meaning to have a go at animating my Prince icon for a while, but I never got around to it because I thought I would have to eliminate it first (reverting all the posts I'd made with it to the default icon) and then put up the new one. Not that this would have been a huge problem, as I don't really use the one of my head any more because it's nearly five years old now. Come to think of it, the symbols on my default one mean very little now, too. How tragic. But still, I don't know what I'd replace them with - it was difficult enough coming up with six in the first place, and I don't think I'm quite ready to use the rabbit avatar here just yet.
The frames from the Prince and Jafar's epic battle animation - there are only six of them, which surprised me given the apparent smoothness - were taken from a Youtube video of the end of the last level so that I didn't have to organize recording them from DOSBox myself. This resulted in an odd roundabout way of capturing the video on the screen with a fixed 100x100 area on CamStudio, then opening that and pasting the frames into Paint.NET so that I could line them all up correctly. I then used a little program that I'd found a while ago called UnFREEz to compile the individual GIFs into an animation.
The most trickery was needed when actually uploading it -
stubbleupdate had told me that if you upload an icon with the same tag as an existing one, then the old one will be shifted out to a new name and the new one will take its place. However, if you've already reached the icon limit as I had, then the upload form is disabled entirely, so you can't even replace them. I got around this by upgrading momentarily to a Plus account and hoping nobody would notice, then replacing the icon, deleting the static one, and switching back to a normal account again. And there it is.I had thought that there was a 10KB size limit on Livejournal icons, but I couldn't find any mention of a cap when I looked it up just now - either way, this one's about 25KB and it worked fine. If you find it supremely irritating, then don't worry, as I'm sure the novelty will wear off in about a week.
Next stop: Editing it so that they're fighting with kippers.
Actually, one hour later, image editing fever's already taken me and I came up with this demonstration of the Prince and Jafar sorting out the Princess's marriage with a rather more peaceful contest.
