Vis Com: Final Gifs

I decided to use some of the textures from my mono-printing session to make the crystals as I thought this would draw focus to them, and also give the square, refracting kind of look that crystals have. I like the way in this image the crystals are more central. In my original roughs the character was more central, but this composition works better for the movement. I wish I had worked on that glittering effect a little more, in each still frame it looked fine but when in motion it doesn't quite come together. I had quite the struggle figuring out the movement of the crystals, I spent quite a while moving them minute amounts on the page to find that this looked clunky and I actually needed a lot less frames with bigger jumps of movement in them. This was pretty frustrating but it made me think about how quickly things moved especially with the blinking in my lava lamp gif. 

This is my least favourite gif, I took a chance and used papercut because I thought it might give a funky effect. The hair movement in particular makes me cringe, it did look alright when there were only 5 frames but once I started duplicating them things got out of hand so there are repeated layers in a row, making the hair stop moving a bit. The whole process with this image was really fiddly and I think there would have been millions of better ways around it but I am not a smart man. I do kind of enjoy the handmade aesthetic of this although I don't like the outcome on the whole. 

I think this is my most successful gif. Initially I was just going to have the lava moving but I'm glad I added the blinking too, because it gives the character life. I struggled a little with making the lava loop-able, I would have liked to have made it flow differently with lava coming from different angles in the image. The colour scheme is pretty good in this, as I wanted it to look like a lava lamp I used different shades of orange - looking at it now it could have been a bit more luminous. When I was making this the blinking looked to be an average speed but now when I look at it it seems too fast, if I were to change this I would add in more frames of the eyes being open so there was space between the blinks. 

All of my gifs are fairly simple, as I am not a skilled animator. I think I could have probably pushed my ideas a bit further, though if I had invested more time into making a really complicated gif then I'm not sure I would have had the time or patience to get two more done. This project has made me more interested in gif-making and how I can improve in this skill

Visual Communication: Work In Progress GIF

For this gif I wanted it to look as if lava in a lava lamp was floating upwards but thought this alone would be too simple so I decided to add in a blink cycle as well. 

At first I sketched out the blinking as I didn't know how many frames it would take to  make a blink. Turns out a lot less than I thought - (open, half closed, closed, half open, open). Sketching it out helped because if I hadn't I probably would have drawn 10 frames that would have been pointless. 

I have learned that naming layers is actually a pretty good idea as then you know which layers are visible or hidden on each frame and it makes the process a lot quicker when you're not fumbling with layers. 

Vis Com: Storyboards

My first idea for my crystal character was to have the crystals grow and then recede back into the shoulders of the character. During a crit it was suggested that the action of the gif needed to give off more power.

From this feedback I drew up a secondary storyboard where the crystals grow - shoot out and then regrow. I think that this would give a more powerful essence to my character as it's a faster more aggressive motion.

These two storyboards would make quite simple gifs. The first would just be a gentle squishing from the blanket and the steam from the cup raising. The second would just be the steam being blown. 

 The rest of my storyboards feature characters who are magical or monsters and could be a set so this one may be a little out of place when put with the others.

 At first I thought about doing the whole body of the character floating on the page with blobs from the lava lamp floating around. Though I was a little unsure about whether the size of the body would be too small on the given size.

It was a pretty simple idea and to amp it up it was suggested that the genie turn from lava into the character and back into lava again. I storyboarded this but I have absolutely no idea how I would go about actually animating that as I am not a skilled animator and I think it might be a little out of my skill range.

My last storyboard I thought was a happy medium as it would be simple enough for me to achieve but the framing would be interesting to look at - with it being extremely zoomed in.

Themes& Characters

I came up with way more than 5 things for each category but narrowed it down to 5 from each to draw from

Amuse:

• "Take a closer look at that snout / Sing my angel of Music"

• The 'hehehehe' lizard 

• Playing Grand Theft Auto with Abi at 2am (Grand Theft Abi)
• "Private Meme's" / Inside jokes (Particularly bland carbs - bread, yorkshire puddings, pastry. Any bland carbohydrate really)
• Dumb Animals (none of my drawings for this were good, I just added it because I couldn't think of ways to turn my other points into characters)

Interest:

• mythical creatures
• crystals
• witches
• goths
• drag/genderbend

Frustrate:

• Chewing noises
• when you can't get to sleep
• when you can't wake up
• when you damage your hair with bleach 
• when you have a weird dream and you remember it being weird but not what actually happened. 

I think these may have been some of the most horrifying characters I've ever drawn. Particularly the anthro shrew woman. I thought a character that had a singing pet shrew, but also looked quite shy and shrew-like herself might be fun. 

My goth characters were looking pretty generic so here I decided to add them into scenarios to give them more of a personality than just a look.

The  crystal being characters were ones I really enjoyed because while still looking human they had an other-worldly quality that was fun to capture. (These characters were particularly fun to sketch in coloured pens too). I struggled a bit with the angles of the crystals but since these are just initial ideas I haven't dwelled on this too much - if I continue with this theme I will reference real crystals.

I will always jump at the chance to draw monsters and add puns to them. The 'genie of the lava lamp' was an idea I've had floating around in my head for a while and this was the perfect project to get it onto paper. 

The 'damaged hair' characters were kind of difficult because they basically all had one trait - having damaged hair, I think I should have pushed this outside the box a bit more and come up with less human designs. 

The anthropomorphic blanket, reflects how I feel about my blankets when I don't want to get up in the morning. This could be a good option for a gif as it could move very slightly, in a squishing motion. 

Grand Theft Abi. Need I say more. 

OUIL406: GIFS!

I chose these two GIFs by Sachin Teng entitled "Cake". 

I find the movement really visually satisfying, the way the cake forms in a cute little bloop around the character, and build up in parts. The wobble of the creme caramel is lovely, and gives a sense of the jelly-ish consistency. In the top gif I enjoy the subtle movements in the face of the character, too as this gives them some more personality. 

The way it starts as just the nude people makes the cake unexpected and ultimately more fun when it comes to light. 

The general feel of these images are cute and fun, maybe slightly sexual but just the right amount. The cakes seem to have been considered to fit the character - or the character to fit the cake, more likely as this was part of the 30 day challenge "your favourite food". This fact makes these images very relevant for the character creation in this brief. 

Visual Language Mutation

My initial idea was to turn myself into a bat somehow (because I'm so goth). I toyed with ideas of just my head being a bat, and also creating large bat wings and hanging from a tree upside down. I really would have liked to continue with this idea as I think it would have been fun to do. I didn't pursue it because at the time I didn't have sufficient material to make the wings and I thought getting into a tree upside down could end badly. 

My second idea was based around the fact that I wish I could change my hair at the drop of my hat. I envisioned a gif with changing hairstyles - which would be made out of paper, like a hair mask. As I didn't have any gif making programs on my computer I made a video instead, which allowed me to add a fun soundtrack to go with the imagery. Though I still used a series of photographs to give the product an animated look, which I really like. 

I found I had trouble affixing the hair masks to my head, in the end I created a contraption out of a headband and a piece of card (like an angler fish arrangement; I did not take photos I wish I had) which the mask could be sellotaped to so it hovered in just about the right place.

I think the idea was good and overall I'm pleased with the outcome because it's amusing. The crafting of the masks and general preparation could have been a lot better though as my real hair is too visible in some shots. Because of this I ended up editing some of the images so the hair was less distracting.