Week 6: Creating a Gif

Week 6: Gif Making 

Here is my screenshot process of designing a gif based on terminator and his glowing eyes

Here is a scan of mechanical themed drawings I produced

Here I selected the terminator head

I isolated the image from the page

Here I adjusted the contrast of the image so I could start painting under it

Here is the image once it has been painted

I added a background that faded into a darker contrast

Here I am messing around with what his eyes could look like, this shot is obviously to dim

I drew upon some references from the images of the real terminator

To get a lens flare effect andy helped me in giving me the idea to scan in some scribbles and overlay the lower brightness variant on the eye 

Here I am lining up the sketch

Removed the white and faded it a bit, and as you can see the flare actually looks really realistic

Now in the layers section you can see that I have all the elements of the image that i'm gonna need to create a gif

Here I started up the gif format in photoshop

The layers tab show me creating multiple frames of an image and then merging them to define those layers as a single frame

more layer work...

To create a realistic glowing and dimming light effect I had to overlay the eyes multiple times but constantly increase and decreasing their brightness levels to give the illusion of glowing red eyes

This shot shows the eyes in their final state

This is where I start integrating the flare effect into the gif

More layer work...

At the bottom of the screen you can see where the frames show the order of what is being shown and the time each frame is on the screen

Here is the final product overall this took me 26 merged frames to create

I really enjoyed creating the gif and thought it was a valuable experience even if there was a lot of slaving away at slightly adjusting layers to get a tiny difference in each frame. It is quite rewarding seeing the gif actually move and I think the lens flare effect actually works quite well, I envisioned this sort of process to be quite difficult but has actually been very enjoyable.

-Max