Studio Brief 1: 'I See Faces' - 1st attempt at an animated GIF - Practice and Play

I am feeling super inspired and exited at the prospect of creating my first ever little animated GIF after seeing what can be achieved by other illustrators and animators. However, as I have never attempted to make a GIF before (I am used to physical illustrated flip books), I was really struggling with the idea of animation and movement and how to go about it. I wasn't sure how I was going to make any of my ideas really come to life using Photoshop, and worrying in this way has made me panic that it will take me some time to get my head around the whole process and that the process overall is going to be extremely confusing and time consuming, taking into consideration endless amounts of layers and specific timings.

To tackle this, I decided to bite the bullet, have a little play in Photoshop and see what I could create. I wasn't too bothered about artwork (as this will come later in my actual GIF's), but I did want to see if I could actually create a character somehow, and this is what I came up with.

To achieve this, I started off with a new layer and a pretty simple shape, adding my first few frames for the animation, making sure that the shape appeared in each frame.

I cut holes for the eyes in the first frame using the rubber tool, adding the orange pupils with the paintbrush which subsequently did this in each shape across all frames, keeping them all the same.






I had an idea for the eyes to do something funky, so I selected a slide and moved the pupils on this layer up or down a step using the arrow keys. Counting how many steps I had moved the eyes in one direction - I moved onto the next slide and made sure to move these eyes on a step further than the previous. Once I had my semi-smooth sequence of up, down, left and right movements for the eyes - I was able to add layers of colour around them towards the end of my animation using more shape.

Adding colour was simple, I wanted it to appear and disappear giving an almost psychedelic 'moment' in the animation. I chose a frame in the animation and added a circle of colour, I then moved onto the next frame and added the previous colour as well as a new colour around it. After I had reached the desired amount of colours, I proceeded to remove them one by one across the remaining frames - giving the illusion of the colour gradually disappearing.

Making sure that each frame had only the necessary layers on show and that my last frame in the animation matched my first, I set my time to a speedy 0.1 seconds a frame and pressed play.

This task was fun and helped me get my head around how showing/hiding different layers on each frame is really beneficial and helps consistency, as well as movement and how to create smooth motion (which I hope to be able to master, if anything, in my final GIF's).

Worries: I am slightly worried about our 24 maximum frame limit...this simple animation is spread over the full 24 frames, and as I want my GIFs to have a lot too them by way of smooth and continuous movement- I think it will be difficult to stick to this number why trying to achieve this.