Inspired by tonight’s #etmooc live animated GIF variety show from Jim Groom, Tom Woodward, Michael Branson-Smith, and Brian Lamb, I could not help but stay up later than advisable making a GIF. It’s a break in the action from grading. No, it’s just like an idea that gets in your brain, and will not stop til you frame it out.

I present, what happens when Educational Technology meets a MOOC in a field, you get E.T. The MOOC(ie).

This was done in Photnshop CS5 with a bunch of layer hi-jinks, starting with basic images of cow in field, and a PNG file of ET (useful for its transparent background). I separated the cow from the background, and backfilled it with some clone brush of the grass. I used two shades of blue and the Render Clouds to fill in the sky.

I had a GIF of a flying saucer from a preious project; I opened that in PhotoShop, copied all of the frames from the animation palette. In my cow file, I made copies of the frames, enough to have twice as many as the animation. I pasted in the spaceship frames (paste into frames option), and nudged it around in layers below the cow to make it land. I brought ET in at several sizes, and made hime waddle up from the ship (flipping it horizontal was cheat enough).

I duplicated the bigger versions of the cow and ET, so I had two layers, and in one used the puppet warp to bend their eyes toward each other. Then it was a matter of droppng in some text, turning layers on and off as needed, and chaning the frame timing to give it pause in places.

Super goofy.

It’s a scarcy combination, but it really is friendly.