Studio Brief 1: 'I See Faces' - Balloon GIF Digital Process

Digital Process

I began by scanning in my paper cut elements individually and editing them in photoshop making sure the colours and textures were clean and how I wanted them and that each element was cut out and free from the back media in which they were stuck. I made sure to keep my original markings for spacing along the bottom to help with the movement process within each frame. 

Editing elements

Layering elements

Once each element was how I wanted it, I was able to layer them on top of each other in the right position and place (using my markings). Each layer/element had its own distance to move across each frame, the separate elements making this a lot easier to deal with. The sun had 4 rotations which were repeated  and continued to repeat throughout all of the frames.

The mountains and clouds moved along a centimeter at a time until getting back to the beginning and the trees moved half a centimetre. I came up with this idea for the movement so I could take into consideration foreground, mid-ground and background. Elements in the background (mountains and clouds) should move slower in the distance than those in the foreground (trees).

I positioned each element accordingly and saved each individual completed frame, building up my GIF. This was a lot of work, but meant that I could have complete control over how everything moved within each frame, hoping that when they came together in the final GIF, each individual element will move free of each other and continuously.

Final frames

Editing each frame

The benefit of having each moving element on separate layers within each saved frame meant that i could edit each layer really easily. I wanted to create a sense of depth int he GIF therefore used photoshop tools to darken and add shadow in the background elements, whilst making the foreground elements brighter and have more impact.

Generating my GIF

Now that I had each individual frame completed, I was able to use "file > place" whilst in the motion template of Photoshop. Each individual frame was added as a new layer, which I was able to order and create a new GIF frame from. 

Timing

As I had designed each frame to have its own elements moving to their own time, I played around with the timing of each overall frame in photoshop and decided (after lots of confusion) that no delay was needed.

Final timing for background

Adding my character 

Adding my hot air balloon character was extremely simple. I made sure the starting position on the first frame was where I wanted it to be then continued to move the balloon using the up and down arrow keys, making sure to go one step further on each of the next frames. This meant that a continuous movement was a achieved of my balloon bobbing up and down.

Final GIF outcome

Successes

I feel I have achieved a lot with this GIF. To say that it is made entirely out of coloured paper/card is something I haven't seen a lot of other practitioners attempt and I proved to myself that it can be done. Each element does exactly what I want it to do and as the foreground, mid-ground and background all move freely of each other, i feel this really does add to the overall sense of depth and feeling of a scene which was my main aim for this GIF. 

Failures

This process of making this GIF was completely out of my comfort zone, and being the first one I have properly created from my own artwork artwork, I feel I set myself a massive challenge, one which took up way too much of my time overall. Having separate elements moving like this was extremely fiddly and hard to get my head around at the best of times, and I am not sure that the amount of effort I have put in is reflected in the overall outcome. Maybe there is an easier way to achieve a similar result?

I am also pretty unhappy with the noise generated from converting my Photoshop motion file to .gif. The artwork seems to have suffered greatly and I wish there was a way around this. I have spent some time researching into how to keep the detail in GIFs as clean as possible, but because the file size is technically being reduced so as to be viewed on the web, it seems a common thing for some of the quality to be lost. This is frustrating because the photoshop file makes the artwork look so perfect and clean, but at least the final GIF looks ok from a distance!