Saturday 26 May 2012

Moon animation

Inspired by Soya's website and her animated gifs I tried making my own.

This is it...




Happy Sunshiny Saturday.

6 comments:

  1. Love it! How do you do it? I've been looking at the ones on cinemagraph.com & I'm totally fascinated by it. Reveal the secrets oh wise one! Cxx

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  2. Ha, I love being called the wise one! I didn't know how to make one either until Thursday night when I looked it up on Google and had a play around. I made it in Photoshop CS5 using images I'd already drawn and coloured. I'm sure there are loads of tutorials out there that can explain it better than me, but basically these are the steps:

    1. You create a sequence of layers in the layer palette of each step or frame of the animation using tif or jpgs or whatever. You basically want one layer to be one frame, and then the layer above it to be the next frame. (A small movement or change in each frame/layer seemed to work best for me. So to get the colours of the cloud rotating, I changed the colour of one strobe in one layer/frame, and added another one in the same colour in the next layer/frame etc.)

    2. When you think you've got it or want to see what it looks like, open the animation window in the toolbar.

    3. Switch the view to "covert to frame animation" in the drop down menu on the animation palette (top right corner next to the arrow), then click the "make frames from layers" button in the same drop-down menu bit.

    4. Select how long you want each frame to run for, or just leave it unchanged.

    5. You can watch your animation by pressing the play button underneath the frame view.

    6. Make any changes you need by adjusting the layers back in your layer palette. (For this mini-animation, I had to add a lot more sequences of the moon moving up from behind the cloud so it didn't jump too much. In this case, each frame of the moon moving was made by copying the moon and pasting it into a layer below the cloud, and then merging those two layers. On the next frame I'd make another two layers with the moon under the cloud, but shift the moon up and across slightly before merging them.)

    7. Once you're happy with how it looks, click "save for web & devices" and then save the whole thing as a gif file.

    8. It's super easy, just a bit time-consuming.

    And that's how I learnt to make a gif animation in a day. I hope it makes sense.

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  3. It looks brilliant - love it! And thanks for the explanation - i'm tempted to try now!

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  4. Very impressive and beautiful!

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  5. That's so good, I love it :)

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