Jamie Beck - Animated GIF

As apart of more experimentation work for our AS to A2 project, we had to make an animation of something really complicated or something really simple. Jamie Beck was out inpiration. He is a well know photographer and creates excellent animation images. Here are some of his work... 

As apart of more experimentation work for our AS to A2 project, we had to make an animation of something really complicated or something really simple. 

The first idea I had was just to make a text animation. The word I choose to make a GIF out of was the word HELLO and then an added smiling face.  I found this animation quite easy to making this GIF. The reason was because it I just had to create a text box and make a new layer every time that I wanted to make a new letter. I choose to make the letters go in a diagonal direction. Also when I creating the text, I made the letters slight bigger than the one before, so it looked like the word was increasing. This animation I was quite happy with because it is very simple. 

For the next GIF I was planning to make, I decided to shoot some photos of my Dad drinking a cup of tea. I tried to make the photos seem like they were in one fluid motion, where I was actually taking the photos by stoping, then starting again. The reason why I decided to take photos of this particular image was because I wanted to make something so simple but it still looks very effective.

Making the animation was quite tricking trying to operate the photos to work with the photoshop application. After a while of trying to figure out how to work it out, I uploaded the eight photographs into the programme and adjusted the brightness and contrast to each of the image. 

Once I had all the images in order of what they should be, I then added a time frame in which that particular photo would play for. After playing around with the time frames, I finally decided that each frame would be 0.1 second. This gave you the chance to see the photo move from one to the other. Once I was happy with the timing and that the photos were in the right order. I saved the file as a GIF, this meant that when it was uploaded to the web it could then play automatically for ages upon end. 

I like the animated GIF idea because it is your own imagination, thinking about where to place photos and how you would display them. At first I found it quite tricky to complete, but after having a few trail and errors in the process, it did become easier to complete. And I think that the jerking movements of the photos all together give the animated image another dimension that is quite 'handmade'  and unique.