Digital Gif

Here I was running out of time! I had 3 days until I needed to submit the Gifs and I wasnt going to miss the deadline! This is not something I am comfortable with at all because normally something I am always good at is time management and leaving enough time to get things done.
I got loads of photos of my flatmate dancing in her room to the song which were really excellent. I got her to dress up in girly childlike clothes with little bows in her hair.

I got loads of photos which I wanted to draw a large amount of but I was running out of time so I had to just chose a few. I managed to draw enough for 12 frames.

I have enjoyed this project and this is now one of my favourite songs. I always work with music blaring out of my speakers so that I have positive energy that I can transfer into my work and this has been really important.

I also took some head shots of her but decided that I wanted to use her whole body dancing.

I used swatches for these images. Again I have used 3 different tones to try and keep it simple. I also used different thicknesses of line for the outlines to the face and the hair. The hair is the most detailed part of the character built up with lots of lines which contrasts well with the clock colour everywhere else. I create a different layer for each different colour with the outline in mid orange in the for-ground. I tried to keep the drawings loose not worrying about the exact number of fingers or the shape of her feet too much.

When creating the Gif I aligned everything up through the use of opacity and aligned the feet so that it makes sense her dancing. Some of the figures are larger than the others because he weight is more forward so that doesnt matter. I also think different heights add to the movement. When I was in photoshop I used shift most of the time to make the figures larger or smaller but a few of the images looked better stretched so that they looked more similar to the others. Also some of the images werent central so I had to free transform and move the image so that it worked with the other images.

I made a little practice one (which has kept a few slides of my reference alignment in). Through making this I realised that I needed to start over with the images because I hadnt deleted the backgrounds so I couldnt add a different background in. So I went back and had to rub out the for-ground layer so that it became see-though.

I took inspiration for the background from my flatmates skirt. I thought flowers would look quite quaint and reflect the characters personality. I also wanted it to work well as a pair with the guy dancing and use similar sized shapes.

This was my Gif! I thought I would have a go with experimenting with the opacity of the background so that the attention of the character wasnt lost with what is going on in the background. The guy Gif was slightly different because it was softer due to the materials used but this is very bold and opaque.

This Gif is 80% Opacity of the background

This Gif is 65% background Opacity. I chose this one as the one to submit!

Again if you focus on different parts of the body it is quite fluid. I think the few lines that are on some of the images of the skirt really add a swish to it and I like that the hair flows around on her shoulders and her arms have a little push down.

I am also quite impressed with my self because I managed to turn the Gif into a video so I could upload it to facebook. Rather than saving it to web (legacy) you have to export, render video. For facebook it has to last a minimum of 10 seconds so this meant copying and pasting the slides quite a few times.