Friday, April 8, 2016

Character Development

Original photo
Hello, do you know where I can find highway 491? No? It doesn't exist? Whatever. I'll find it myself. Oh- wait. That's the wrong line. What I MEANT to say was that: Hello! New week! How you've been? Alright? Good? Have a nice easter? No? Whatever. Anyway, I'm a pretty good person in general and want to make other people happy, (Including myself,) and I'm a perfectionist. Why do I mention this? My answer to that is; Did you even read the title? CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT! I'm a perfectionist! That's character development! Never mind.... Anyway, you may not no that, but I always want everything to be perfect, especially when it comes to art. I doubt it's OCD, but it can be annoying. Speaking of which, in art we're doing this project where you draw grid lines on one picture and draw grid lines on your paper, and copy the picture. I mention this because it takes like twice as long as everybody else on the copy, because I want it to be freaking perfect. I just can't do it messy even if I wanted to! It's kinda ludicrous. Perhaps an enemy of mine hypnotized me in my sleep so I must do everything perfect! IT'S GENIUS- wait- wait- no... no it's not.
Cutout

When we animate ourselves, we have to exaggerate certain character traits for our character. I think mine will do everything really slowly and perfectly, but still messes stuff up sometimes. I would do this because I'm (as
Final .GIF warp thing...
stated before) a perfectionist, but I sometimes mess things up more often then I would like to admit. My character should also be an artist, but take a long time drawing and sketching. I could do this by making each thing my character does by having my character do things a lot slower than other people, and STILL manage to mess things up. Kinda like a sloth that accidentally spills drinks and breaks dishes, bu
t not THAT slow. I may make a few tweaks to this character in the final animation, but this is the base idea.

Creating an animated .GIF is a little bit tricky, but also kinda fun. The first step is to take a photo of yourself and shove it into photoshop. Using the quick selection tool, cut yourself out and downsize the photo so it ISN'T 6 feet tall. No, really. It's usually 6
feet tall. Next, bring up the animation toolbar at the bottom. Then, you move your character into frame gradually, making a new frame on the animation bar every bit you move it by. When it's in frame, you can duplicate the layer and use the puppet warp tool to move your character's arms or legs or whatever. Each frame that you use the puppet warp, you need to create a new layer for, and make only that layer shown in the frame. It's a little complicated, but finally you either select all frames and duplicate them and then reverse them to make it loop, or you move it bak out of frame. This makes it loop. Then you select all frames and change the timing to 0.1 seconds. If you want, make an epic background for it, or just take a photo of something and stick it in there. To save, click the "Save for web and devices" button, select the settings you want, and save it as a .GIF file. Done! You can post it onto your blog or whatever. Awesome... right? Right?

I'll assume the answer is "Right"
-Linden