Blunt Film Pick: Cyriak

As I’ve been talking about using photos in animation, here’s a perfect example of what can be achieved. This is a compilation of Cyriaks Gif animations.

Flipbook Fun: Golf Thewlis goes Berzerk

This is another animation created on Flip Book (see previous articles: Best of Flip Book and Making animated Gifs: Flip Book). It’s easy and fun to do. In the animated Gif below you can see Golf Thewlis trapped in the world of 80’s retro game Berzerk.

Making an Animated Gif using CS4

Hello there! Golf Thewlis here with another installment on animated GIFs! GIFs are great as humourous ads or inserts for your web page but how do you make the little bastards? I haven’t got a clue so I’m going to hand this over to one of the technical people at Blunt who know  a bit about computers. Go on there…

A lot of programmes like After Effects and Premiere have the ability to save your movie as an animated Gif. But for this tutorial we’re looking at how you to make an animated Gif from scratch using CS4.

It’s a good idea to have a think about your Gif before you start with CS4. Most GIFs work as loops so they appear to repeat the same action for ever. Using this as my starting point I found the famous photos Muybridge did of the nude man walking (“That’s walking” – Golf). In this example I’m using a series where the nude man is going up the stairs.

Using Photoshop I made each frame into a layer. I also altered each frame to make it look as if the nude man was forever ascending the stairs.

Now go to the Window tab and choose Animation.

This will open up a timeline like the one in the picture underneath.

Now click on the little menu button at the right hand side of the animation timeline. This will bring up the option of turning your layers into frames. Do that and you will see the frames gathered on your timeline.

On each frame you can adjust the length of each frame. Fiddle around with this option to make sure your animations aren’t too fast.

Now it’s time to save your image. Go to Save for Web & Devices. Make sure you save it as a GIF. In the right hand bottom corner there is a choice of whether you want to have your animation play once  or forever. I’m choosing to have it set on forever so it will be on a continuous loop.

Here’s the finished piece.

Making Animated Gifs: Flip Book

Hi there! Golf Thewlis here talking about animated Gifs again. Underneath is a great example of how you can make a quick and easy animated Gif. All the worry has been taken out of your hands and now you can just get on and animate. It’s called ‘Flip book’ and it’s a great little tool for creating fun cartoons. My example has me pissing on a grave. For legal reasons I can’t tell whose grave it is but rest assured the bastard deserved it.

Follow the link to Flip Book and have a go yourself.
See you soon for a bit more on animated Gifs.

Animation Month: Animated Gifs

An animated Gif is about the shortest film you can get. Made up of just a few frames it has become quite an art form as witnessed below.

This one (AT AT)  is by the artist Cyriak. You can find more of his work here: http://www.cyriak.co.uk/

This is by artist Sarah Bear. Both Cyriak and Sarah Bear collaborated on the film Meow which was one of our Film Picks in January. Check it out here.

Tomorrow we shall look into producing a GIF.