The Cinderella Man — The Real Jim Braddock Story

Reviewed 4.8 stars out of 5.0 Stars by The New York Times!

Here is a GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) animation piece I created during a break from editing The Real James Braddock Story documentary. (This simple GIF animation requires no plug-ins when viewed on the Internet & is self-looping, unlike Flash.)

This excerpt is from the movie about James Braddock, the American boxer who emerged from the Great Depression era – if you are familiar with the story, you would agree that it is a true Cinderella story. Here James is punching the heavy bag while his best friend & manager Joe Gould holds it for a photo-op. Look closely & you'll notice that James is only brushing the front of the bag & hitting its sides (something Joe surely thought to be a good idea).

I was brought into this project during the post-production phase for its final go over. They gave me several pieces of film that I restored & optimized, some of which I also turned into GIF animations. I used Photoshop & ImageReady to edit individual frames for the movie. It takes 30 frames to make only one second of viewing footage (29.97 frames to be exact) & each frame is comprised of two fields – one even & one odd field per frame – so clearly it can be a laborious job. After racking my brain searching for a fast & simple solution to restore the film footage, I gave up & went to bed at about 1:30 a.m. As I lay in bed in the night air and lingered between the not quite awake & not quite asleep stage, the solution entered my smoky & clouded mind. Presto! The editing gods smiled on me! I quickly jumped from bed, sat in front of the editing system and began pounding the keys, recording each process. I was then able to create an Action in Photoshop that I applied to the frames. At one point, I had over 178 documents opened at once in Photoshop

I would like to thank Erin Skitt & Bill Hudson from Apple Computer for their help on this project. I would also like to thank Graeme Nattress http://www.nattress.com who assisted me with his excellent Standards Conversion for the PAL version of the movie.

— victor m maldonado :)