*dramatic soap opera music*

[presumenothing]

Challenge #8

In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, a gift of your time to the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Learning how to gif! With extra proud-ness given that I (a) started from basically 0 knowledge of Photoshop save whatever remnants I remember from using GIMP like a decade ago, (b) generally don't consider myself as being any good with colours, and (c) managed to pull off pretty much every moderate-to-very unhinged gif idea I had, including some animations done from scratch.

Probably a whole 90% possibly more of everything I made was Zhou Shen because I'm single-minded like that (full gallery here!), with the rest scattered across various fandoms, starting with a particular SecUnit-favoured show…

( Murderbot, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon: Gif on Tumblr ) – logo design from Tor

( Word of Honor: Gif on Tumblr ) – more gifs in the tag


( The Legend of Luoxiaohei: Gifset on Tumblr ) – more gifs in the tag


( Project Sekai: Gifset on Tumblr )


( Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun: Gif on Tumblr ) – drawn and animated from scratch!


( Murderbot, All Systems Red: Gif on Tumblr ) – another one created from scratch!

All can be found in my gif tag on Tumblr, including some before/after comparisons and effect breakdowns if you're interested in the process.

(Non-fannishly, it'd be cooking! Which was a development I would never have seen coming.)

Comments

[halfcactus]

Illustrator is great for drawing shapes, not so much for animation—After Effects is probably what you want for more animation features (probably similar to the PS Timeline feature that allows keyframes? Which I never really got the hang of XD). But I could never get my “””unofficial””” version to work long enough for me to use it 💀

You already did so much on PS though!!!!! Like the one where those critters are eating lollipops 🥺 It’s making me miss playing around with PS haha. I don’t think I even know how smart objects work, only that that knowledge is going to come in handy when you move to AfterEffects!

[presumenothing]

OH YEAH After Effects is probably what I was thinking of!!

I hadn't done any animation stuff before this (…unless you count powerpoints…) so tbh I had trouble understanding the whole timeline/keyframe thing at first, especially since most Tumblr tutorials still use frame animation, but then once it clicked everything got so much easier… and then I proceeded to overtax it doing all this lol. It's surprising what you can do just using PS, though I feel like not many giffers take full advantage of it! Or possibly I just like fancy gif effects waaaaay too much.