FLASH WARNING…
The first thing that came to my mind when I got this assignment was animating my helping hands. They look like humans, and they have joints to move around, but what could they be doing? After sitting and staring at them for a while, two things kept circulating in my mind the endless smudges I get on the magnifying glass and how I miss going out and dancing. So I decided to use those thoughts as inspiration.
First, I worked on the dancing character. On my first attempt, I ran into a couple of creative problems:
- Framing: I tried cropping it afterward but getting all the frames cropped the same way in this software was really difficult. It really bothered me when the platform moved at all.
- Lighting: I underexposed the image to make it feel more like the character was in a bar, but it needed more. I grabbed my flashlight and turned it on every other frame to give it a strobe light effect on the second go.
For the second gif, I wanted to have the helping hands clean its own magnifying glass. While storyboarding it out, I didn’t think the lens cloth appearing would work, but after creating it, I really like.
For the second set, I wanted to work with fire and ice. To get the shots, I ended up using the time-lapse feature in both setups. For the match, the interval was set to 1 second and ended up taking only a couple of seconds. For the ice, the interval was set to 60 seconds and took just under two hours.
When I evaluate both images, time was really against me. I would have liked to shoot a faster interval for the match to capture more of the flame. I needed to light the set with artificial lighting instead of window light to correct the light shifting throughout the day for the ice.
All in all, I really loved making these gifs. Some software limitations got frustrating, like the slow interval timer, the cropping feature, and my camera not being supported (I ended up using my phone), but it got the job done.