Richard Armitage Screensaver: Take 2

Happy Friday! I have a smile on my face because the cold, rainy weather is finally moving out and making room for 70s and sunshine this weekend. We definitely could use the lovely weather around here since in my house we’ve got colds, ear infections, sinus infections and bronchitis taking their toll.

All of this sickness has meant lots of time trying to rest on the sofa, movie marathons, and for me, playing around on the computer. I opted to make another screensaver and I’m pretty sure the last time I spent this much time on a single project was when I made my last fanvid. It isn’t often that I contemplate giving up on a project, but I got to that point with this one. I’d just closed all the files and said I was done with it! Thanks to ItsJSforMe, I decided to give it another go and managed to find what I needed to make the project a success.

This screensaver taught me a few things.

1. There are projects that are too big for Photoshop to save as a gif.
2. You can save animations as video in Photoshop CS6! (How cool is that?)
3. If you have to turn your project into a video instead of a gif the method of making a screensaver is totally different. 😦
4. I am easily frustrated when things don’t go my way.
5. The joy that comes with finally solving the puzzle makes it all worthwhile! 😉

Since the project had to be saved as a video, I uploaded it to YouTube. It’s 9+ minutes long, but if you want an idea of what the screensaver looks like you can just watch the first couple of minutes.

In case anyone is interested in a copy, you can download it here.

 

First Attempt: Richard Armitage Screensaver

Happy Easter everyone! I hope that if this special day means something for you, that you are enjoying the celebrations.

In the last couple of days I got a spark of inspiration. What was it this time? Well, I thought I would try and figure out how to make my own screensaver. It turns out that this is a multi-step process…at least the method I found. It started out with making an animated gif in Photoshop, which thankfully I already know how to do. Then it was on to converting it to an swf file in Flash (gotta love free 30 day trials). The last step was using a freeware program that converts the flash file into a screensaver. The program was not only free, but also really straightfoward!

So here is the gif I started out with (I had to shrink it for WordPress):

 

Now that I know how to do this, I think I’ll go back and see if I can make something a little more polished. If anyone is interested in a copy of the screensaver, you can download the install file here. I love that once I installed the file, I simply had to go into the personalize option and select this as my screensaver. Believe it or not, I’m all about easy! 😉