THANK YOU BING IMAGE SEARCH. Thought I lost this! 8D
I made this in 1996. To make it back then was a million times harder than it would have been today: screen capped each frame in the loop by hooking up my VCR to my TV capture card (it was this external monstrosity with a separate power cord XD). The screen caps had bad color, were blurry, and full of static so I redrew each frame pixel by pixel with a mouse (wasn’t so good at image editing programs back then). XD;;
Of course, it got lost over time because I made that thing like 203498203489 computers ago, so I’m glad people jacked it from my site back in the day. XD
Periodically this posts nukes my notifs and I wonder if giving additional info would even be worth it, but I figure it doesn’t hurt to add, I’m not forcing anyone to read it. Maybe archivists will like it. The way things for the web were built are done differently due to the changes in technical limitations— details nobody would realize unless you were from that time. But, maybe fan motivations could be similar? Hah, idk. It was normal for anime fandom online to go to a lot of trouble for our content— as my best friend puts it, “We all fucking walked 15 miles uphill in the snow for anime fandom, that was standard!” and a lot of people who have been online as anime fans since the 90s know each other or at least know each others’ work. (Hey everyone— I’m PIMoSDL from the Ranma ML. Anyone still alive? Hahaha.)
- This gif was inspired by an even older dancing Lum gif (transparent background, Lum facing forward, the dance from the Lum’s Love Song ending from Urusei Yatsura, I can’t seem to find that gif anywhere and have no idea who made it), which was on a buddy’s Ranma site that’s long gone. As a new webmaster I wanted an animated gif on my anime site too, because animated gifs were cutting edge, but it HAD to be one I made myself! From OUR fandom! It HAD to have a transparent background because that was more immersive, and I wanted everything on my anime site to be content I produced (it was the first English Ranma and Akane shipper shrine ever; even back then my first foray was into fandom because of ship wars, hahaha. I had a whole fucking career as a web designer because I shipped Ranma and Akane.)
- I had to jam the card onto the motherboard with my foot (don’t do this) because it was too hard for me to push in. My boyfriend (who bought me the card after I asked how to get screencaps onto a computer “like those college kids do”) bought it at a computer show; we were still mostly limited to local options for many specialty purchases. Also, I married that guy and we have two kids now 🤍
- The first adapter (A/V adapter) didn’t work, so he brought me a coax adapter (hence— static on the screen caps)
- You could not just hit “print screen” to get screenshots of video back then. I had to export screen caps from the capture software and use the pause on my VCR if I wanted specific frames. I was lucky enough to have a frame-by-frame feature on my VCR but it left even more lines and static on the frames compared to just playing video and hitting the “capture” button in my software. There was no choice but to redraw everything.
- The version of Photoshop that I had was 4.0. It didn’t even have a tool to make rounded corners or rounded corner vector paths, so it sure as hell didn’t have an animation panel/animated gif export 😆
- The frames were made in Paint Shop Pro. It was saved to .gif in a separate program (forgot which) where I had to manually enter the hex values for the color palette because I didn’t understand why t f it was messing around with my colors and adding “dots.” I freaked out a bit and had to manually fix all the “dots” that were added from dithering
- This was my first gif. I tried my best to make it as small as I knew how to (which was already a relevant professional skill back then, since most people downloaded graphics over a 14.4 modem; 14kb a second. A web page that took up 1mb was about the most you wanted to make— I was working as a fledgling web dev after school for a local company and was learning all this stuff at the time, using my Ranma site as a test grounds for any new tech I was learning. The site’s still up and the last time I edited it was when frames were still in vogue, it’s been a minute lol)
- This gif helped make, and outlived, my entire career as a web designer. Companies always change their web presence, so it’s survived past anything I ever made professionally, and it’s loved more than any stupid corporate junk I made, hahaha
amhrancas 