Kumkum does that thing

She does that thing.

Kumkum in 'Dagha Dagha Vai Vai Vai'  from Kali Topi Lal Rumal (1959). It's a gif than can be easily made using any of the tools easily available online. Displaying a gif in Blogger though needs a little trick as blogger doesn't support gif. I first uploaded the gif to Google Docs, then set its share setting to everyone, took the image link url and then used it here.

That's the easy part.

Now, here's the  real mindbender.


Created using a Python script created by Philip Guo  (at Stanford.edu)

It basically takes a static jpg image, adds a user defined Zoom effect to it (using a beautiful logic that let's a person even control the 'Zoom' area) and then outputs it as a gif (using ImageMagick, making which work with the script in Fedora proved the first hurdle. I kept running into "x11"  problem that was finally solved by: yum groupinstall "X Software Development".)

The Python script is meant to be used for a static image, instead I fed it a .gif. It kept running into "list index out of range" problem. Simple codemonkey solution: I added a try-exception-pass-continue at some specific lines and wallah!

(There was also the issue of size. The original gif went to about 12 MB. Controlled that using Gimp by keeping the gif indexed at 8 bit. Brought it down to just about 3Mb...still rendering can be an issue on slow connections.)

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Previous crazy project: Trying to re-create a Kashmiri tune from 19th century.