Exercise: Create a GIF

I chose a Puffin photo to trace and given their hilarious little landings they do I thought it would be fun to try to exaggerate the movement to be windy in mid flight.

Source:

McAdam, R. (2015) Puffin Landing [Image] Pixels. Available at: https://pixels.com/featured/puffin-landing-rory-mcadam.html (Accessed: 7th March, 2023)

I drew a full set:

Then I uploaded these onto Giphy to get the below GIF with added humorous caption.

For this, I used my phone, a car phone holder and placed the pages in the exact same position on top of each other.

Some initial reflections:

• This was a rather analogue way of doing it and it made the image more rough looking but I also think it matched well the idea of being blown away.
• I realised that some of the drawings underneath could lightly be seen but I decided to keep it as I think it helped add to the effect of windy movement
• I really tried to move around the wings for exaggerated movement, though had I stuck more to the original I guess it would have looked steadier or had I fully moved the wings down and up it could have captured the flap of the wings so it was interesting doing this and seeing it move around
• Using pens I realised that it came off darker or lighter in each drawing so this also helped get a bit of texture and movement to the feathers which I like but perhaps is not good when you need solid colour
• I realised there was also a lot of fun filters stickers or text to play with e.g. bad tv below which is fun
• With the below I also moved around the order and picked the best drawings so that the little left leg moved progressively upwards with the ‘wind’

I then decided to use the same exact drawing but move the drawing angle around using photoshop to see if it would give a cleaner movement in the air – which is does but it doesn’t have the more natural movement of the actual bird itself that is lost with only using one same image

Then I tried a new set of drawings and scanned them this time at high resolution and with a slightly different and simpler drawing style.

I combined the different drawings with also some movement for only one puffin who is coming down to land next to a stationary one standing on the ground – by having something stationary and one thing moving I thought it gave the extra contrast to the flying puffin.

I had to really play around with Photoshop to get this, using the first full drawing and then cutting out and keeping the bottom puffin and grassland the same and in the same position and then adding in cut out parts of the other puffins using different layers and creating various jpegs.

Some more reflections:

• Using a high res scanner helps clean the paper and get a tidier look rather than doing this by hand and using my phone, but it slightly washed out the ink compared to the others so depending on how dark or light you might want it, playing around in Photoshop can help adjust as needed
• The first trial does indeed look more blown around due to the drawing where I tried to make adjustments gradually rather than sticking to the same drawing each time so depending on just how much movement you want or not, you could get really messy or really tidy with the tracing – which I think you can see well in the research exercise where some are more obvious or have more movement than others.