I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to start a new project so I decided to just do some doodling. Practice some line-work and watch Gravity Falls with my daughter. I have heard some good stuff about the show so I thought we’d check it out. It is really fun and I highly recommend it. Back to the matter at hand…
It isn’t a good drawing but it is something. I haven’t done anything with animations lately so I thought it might be fun to mess around a little bit. I didn’t even do a good scan. I just used a mobile phone pic, cleaned it up a bit and got to work. The last few animations I did didn’t really work out because I was impatient. I didn’t want to spend a ton of time working on this so I tried to figure out what areas to focus on and the best way to maximize frames so it would appear smooth but the file size wouldn’t get too bulky. Ok, so I know this is probably the most boring thing to read about but I’ll be honest, everything is pretty crappy right now and it doesn’t seem like anyone is trying to make it better. I’m trying. I’m frustrated and depressed and I feel totally helpless but what I can do is write boring process posts that might in some way bring normalcy to my little corner of the internet. I’ve always said I will not talk about politics on this site and I’m going to keep it that way. It just seems like everyone is looking to make things worse. Instead of looking for solutions and compromise people are looking to win. Both sides are saying the exact same things but swapping out their heroes and targets. It’s like a political Mad Lib with a focus on MAD. Neither side feels justly treated and instead of seeking common ground they are just firebombing the other side. I have been trying to find the humor in it but it seems like there is no place for humor these days. There was an issue recently that two different friends were talking at me about at separate times. Both were passionately defending their opposing views. I said, to both, “You intentionally try to irritate others and then you are surprised when they get mad.” Both people responded with, “Exactly!” having swapped out the ‘you’ and ‘others’ to fit their view. So I took my time slowly developing the steps of the animation while keeping the file size rather large. The other problem I’ve had in the past was a loss of quality in the final gif. I worked large and sampled it down before doing the final save…
The last thing I struggled with was which way to run the animation. I originally started with the intention of having the image disappear but while I was working I thought it would be much more intriguing to see it appear. Kind of like the final reveal on a magic trick. After watching it both ways I definitely prefer the reveal…