ENTER! TOS Avatar Contest #18 | "Arena"

[Orac]

Thanks again to everyone who entered and voted in the last contest for "The Squire of Gothos".

And of course, congratulations to the winners!
Gary7 & HopefulRomantic


It's time again for a new contest...

Episode:
Arena

TOS Theme:
Vasquez Rocks

Random Theme:
Secret Agents


TrekBBS rules apply; The maximum size of your custom image is 140x140 pixels and 140kb.

This is (roughly) a bi-weekly contest so entries will be accepted for 10 days from the date of this post, with the subsequent poll lasting 4 days.

Enter now!

 

[ItsGreen]

Episode:

I want this but over the limit!

TOS Theme

or

if it needs to be TOS associated?

Random

 

[od0_ital]

Not sure what I'll go with this week...

Quick favor to ask! If ya haven't already, could ya vote in the general scifi avatar contest? There's a tie & a very close second place right now & the poll closes tonight!

http://trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=143051

 

[Hopeful Romantic]

Episode:

Theme:

Random Theme:

 

[Gary7]

Episode:

TOS Theme:

Random:

 

[Admiral Shran]

-Episode-

-Theme-

I pains me to use this because I absolutely LOATHE the movie, but is it nice.

-Random Theme-

 

[Gary7]

I have a substitution for TOS Theme (Vasquez Rocks):

Thanks.

 

[Gary7]

Episode:

I want this but over the limit!

You can probably take a few frames off the end (where Kirk slides off to the right). The biggest challenge for an animated GIF is a changing background. If the background pans a bit, you can help minimize the changes by using the same background for a few frames.

 

[ItsGreen]

I don't have a gif editor that will do a good enough job, anything I tried yielded poor results! This was a web found gif that I made smaller and tried to reduce it's kb size as best I could keeping quality.

What programs do you recommend!

and if someone wants to get this under size, please do so! I'll vote for it!

 

[Gary7]

^ GIMP is a pretty good free editor. But anyway, I checked the file size and it's a whopping 718kb... I'd recommend starting fresh rather than trying to use this one. If you have "Arena" on DVD, use VLC media player and do frame snapshots (captures). You get to the point where you want to start, press "Shift+S" to save, then "E" to advance a couple of frames, then save again. You can then assemble the captured pictures in an editor like GIMP.

 

[Gary7]

Well, I gave it a shot. Brought it down to just under 500kb using GIMP after resizing to within 140x105 (your original size was 160x120). I then took the frames out and reloaded them into Photoshop and tried optimizing it there... best I could do was 391kb.

In order to work it down to 140kb, there'd have to be some serious time spent trimming images and reusing backgrounds, maybe a few hours. I'd be obliged to help if it took a more reasonable amount of time... (already spent a couple of hours on avatars this week!). Sorry, ItsGreen.

If you have created some animated GIF's before, there's one thing you can try if you're up for investing the time. Use one static background for all of the frames (maybe a nice clean shot of the tree with the Vasquez rocks behind it) and trim off the background around Kirk and Gorn for each fight frame. It'll take you a couple of hours, but it'd probably work.

 

[od0_ital]

- Episode -

Sittin' out the theme contests this week, 'cause these are the entries I made without checkin' the whole thread first...

and

Admiral Shran is sure to get votes, though!

 

[Gary7]

^ Od0_ital, perfectly OK for there to be multiple interpretations on the same theme. Are you sure you don't want to enter your theme avatars?


FYI, entries will be accepted up through this evening, so there's still time. Let's see a few more!

 

[od0_ital]

^

Yeah, I'm sure. My own fault for not scrollin' through the whole thread before makin' my avatars.

 

[Gary7]

Ah, nothing like a little Gorn aerobics in the morning.