Creating The GIF

 Learning something new

As I said in my previous post I had merged the layers together before I had actually began to make the GIF. So loading the picture into Photoshop again I realised that I was very restricted when creating the GIF because I couldn’t move around anything since it was one image. I thought at this time that I would have to redraw the image or at least part of it. 

The first thing is first, I had to enable the animation window so I could create new animation slides to work on. The way that Photoshop animation works is that whatever layer is showing and where ever the layer is played on that animation slide, is where it will appear when the animation is being played. Since I wanted the fireflies to move around him I had to remove the existing fireflies onto their own layer so that I could move them around easier. 

Once they were on their own layer I had to fix the existing background because I removed the fireflies so I used some of the existing background and eye dropped the colour, merging them together to make it look like nothing was missing. At the end of the animation I created 42 frames to create a simple animation clip of fireflies moving round the alien and his orbs letting off a glowing atmosphere. 

Going through every detail and having numerous layers of lights, highlights, dust particles and even the slightest movement of his chest, all this was done on different layers. 

Starting from the first animation layer there was a number of things I had to keep in mind such as where the fireflies started from, the light on his leg and his face where the firefly would pass and the glowing effect on the orbs. I had to adjust these on every layer, changing the opacity of the lights on every frame as the fireflies past over certain points of the alien. For example on the first frame I created a yellow light on the lower right side of his leg and the inside of the left leg. On the first frame I had the opacity set at around 10 and on the next frame, depending where the firefly was I would set the opacity higher. 

I had to keep this in mind for all the little aspects of the GIF and I did this for all the lights and glow effects of the orbs and fireflies. 

After I had done this I realised that he had to blink and that his body would move slightly from him breathing. Since I flattened the image from before I didn’t really have much to work with so for the eyes I created a new layer and coloured the white on his eyes black so he looked like he blinked. 

As for the breathing I had to figure something out. So duplicating the image I used the warp tool to move the image around. This gave me the advantages of setting points to keep the proportion the same but move the image and not lose the quality as if I had done it with the liquify tool. Doing the same process as I did with the light effects I placed the full image on about 8 animation frames down and changed the opacity on the previous frames so that the layer would gradually change and wasn’t just a simple switch. This gave it a more natural look and wasn’t such a jump in animation. 

After I had done everything I tweaked little things such as how long each animation layer would play for and if it would be on loop or just a single cycle. Once I had finished I had to import the file as a correct GIF format for it work and play correctly. So instead of going to file and clicking save as, I clicked save for Web & Devices. This then brought up a number of different options to save as, to edit or different versions. I didn’t really mess with anything except giving the GIF the full colours to work with. After making sure everything was okay I saved it to the desktop and checked to see how it would run. Loading up it opened up in the web browser and began to run smoothly.

This was my final design for the presentation for Thursday.