Of course you should be able to make animated GIFs in Emacs

I was wondering what a convenient production process for GIFs from movies would be like, so I hacked my hacked version of mplayer a bit more.  Nothing major, since it already has all the functionality, but it doesn’t group continuous screenshots by name, which makes picking out the animations afterwards awkward.

There’s probably a gazillion GIF editors out there already, but since the things you typically want to do with an animation (trim start/end, adjust speed and how many frames to skip) are kinda trivial, it seemed more convenient to just write a mode in Emacs.  So I did.

It uses the ImageMagick “convert” command to actually stitch the images together in the end after you’ve done the edit, so it’s not a pure Emacs-only solution.

Creating GIFs in Emacs

And here’s the result:

I’m sure this is going to turn out to be really useful some day!

WFC Luxembourg: Elles

This isn’t a very Luxembourgian (that a word) film. It’s a Belgian/French/Luxembourgassian/Portuguese/Spanish/Swiss coproduction, but it was stil lthe Luxembourg submission for the Oscars that year.

That it’s a European copro-duction is usually not a good sign: You often get a neutered lowest common demoninator sausage from that factory, but I kinda had hopes for this film anyway. It’s a very attractive cast. But it’s pretty much exactly what I was all ascared of: Incomprehensively awful dialogue, wince-worthy plot lines, pedestrian cinematography and a grainy, bland film transfer to DVD.

The cast is pretty good, though; especially the five titular Women. If only they had a film to act in.

I liked the end of the party scene.

Two more films to go in this blog series, but they’re still stuck in the mail. That is, Borderlinx is sitting on them, unable to find my packages, so I’ll guess I’ll just have to re-buy the last two films.

Women. Luís Galvão Teles. 1997. Luxembourg.

Absolute Stress ​

  • 1 part vodka
  • 1 part coconut rum
  • 1 part peach schnapps
  • 3 parts orange juice
  • 3 parts pineapple juice

Shake with ice and strain into an ice-filled glass. Garnish with a slice of orance and a cherry.

This post is part of the World of Films and Cocktails series. Explore the map.