Studio Brief 1: 'I See Faces' - Final GIFs and Self Evaluation

Final Animated GIFs

After much work and many many hours sat struggling on photoshop, I have to say I am pretty pleased with the outcome and fruits of my labour. I have always tended to put the idea of moving image in the 'Animation' box, so to see how illustration can also enter this word of motion has been extremely inspiring.

GIF 1: Hot Air Balloon

Self Evaluation

This GIF was a COMPLETE nightmare to create. When I first came up with the idea, I thought having the separate moving elements (foreground, mid-ground and background) made physically out of paper and card would actually help me in the process, however it just turned out to be a lot more complicated than I had imagined - as with everything I seem to attempt. Also converting a photoshop motion file to GIF format in the final stages of this process, seems to just not like scanned in flat colour. A lot of pixelation, scratching and noise appears in my final result because of my choice to use flat coloured cut paper and I spent so much of my time researching into how to overcome this issue - but to no avail. It seems to be a common thing to have a GIF lose its quality considerably when converting to GIF and reducing the file size, but even so - it sucked to see this work deteriorate before my eyes as I feel the pixelation takes away from the overall quality of the animation. Due to these issues, I spent a lot longer on this GIF than I had wanted too, being one of the main reasons I only produced 2 final GIFs instead of the 3 requested in the brief.

Despite all the problems, I think I achieved a lot with this work that I had set out to do. I wanted to convey a big interest of mine - travel, and wanted my GIF to have a lot going on by way of movement and colour. Having separate moving elements across the foreground, mid-ground and background meant that I could edit these elements separately once scanned in which helped to strengthen the idea of depth. In most cases, I managed to overcome the issues I had with movement and timing and actually produced something quite complicated, ambitious and way out of my comfort zone considering I have never created anything remotely like this before. There are a few things wrong with the overall GIF, a few frames out of place thanks to unfathomable mathematics, but they aren't as noticeable to other people which is the main thing.

GIF 2: Rolling Cat

Self Evaluation

After all the complication of my first GIF, I wanted to strip things back a little with my second and have a little more fun. Despite being quite a simple concept, I put a lot of work into the physical artwork, with each individual frame having its own hand drawn illustration, which again took a lot of time. To help with this, I was able to use a light box which aided the positioning and repetition of key elements and I think this paid off over all. If I could re-do this GIF, I would like the eye elements of the cat to remain analogue, in keeping with the rest of the illustration. Although creating the eyes in photoshop did help with the process, I think these Digital elements pop and stand out a little too much and that hand drawn eyes moving throughout the GIF would have been more appropriate to the overall aesthetic. In my haste when completing this GIF, I had not paid much attention to the white space around the cat. I do like the rough and ready feel of the paper and its creases/shadows - however I would have liked this to be completely white and clean.

My main accomplishment with this GIF was generating smooth continuous animation. I anticipated that to achieve what I wanted - I would have to have a lot of hand drawn frames to minimise the jump between each movement. Originally this GIF had in excess of 40 frames and although the transition between movements was really smooth, the overall spinning of the cat was way too slow. With each frame at a timing of 0 secs, the movement was still too slow and I couldn't make the timing any less than 0 seconds (obviously) so the only other option was to remove frames. Removing frames did mean their is a bigger jump between steps (and some of the artwork was now no longer featuring in the piece), but this did speed up the motion overall, with the transition still being pretty smooth (and quite hypnotic if you stare at it too long).

Strengths

I was extremely nervous when showing my GIFs to everyone on hand in day. A lot of people had previous experience of making GIFs unlike me and had some great ideas in terms of character design and personality. I got great feedback from my peers for this brief, everyone I spoke too seemed to recognise the work I had put into each which was great.

Overall, I found this brief to be really beneficial to my practice. I enjoyed learning a new process of generating an animated GIF and would like to create more now that I know how. A still illustration has its benefits and qualities, but being able to make an illustration move turns it it to something completely different and in a lot of cases more striking and relatable. I managed to achieve something I would have thought quite impossible in the time given - like making a GIF from moving paper and I was also able to achieve smooth motion which was my main aim from this overall task. Trying new things and facing problems along the way pays off.