In this Discussion
- agentnumone April 2007
- area22stone May 2007
- beckysioux March 2008
- bongobear70 May 2007
- boydeer22 July 2007
- bugleverse2 July 2007
- canoe7grape October 2008
- clamnight2 April 2007
- cobwebvault5 August 2007
- Courtneytastic July 2007
- decadegym9 August 2007
- DJRose December 2007
- doctor5cap June 2007
- dollarflame6 October 2008
- dust33rain August 2007
- firexpert6 July 2008
- fog05tile May 2007
- hail9fat August 2007
- honey9layer March 2008
- knot34story June 2007
- KristaMichelle August 2007
- lier19phone May 2007
- llama0engine July 2008
- LolaBert March 2008
- manx9shrine August 2007
- markpull6 April 2007
- mayonaise March 2008
- monday94ear August 2007
- mumblo August 2007
- patioshell97 August 2007
- plane8order December 2007
- punkwhitechocolate November 2007
- Rebekker July 2008
- sackrose55 August 2007
- sherib August 2007
- spy9black July 2007
- suit6lion June 2007
- sureeyesawake August 2007
- target35ghost March 2008
- Tempe Arizona October 2008
- thephantommilk October 2007
- truckorgan02 June 2007
- walk2sock August 2007
- week84crab October 2008
- worm68fat August 2007
- yak63geese May 2007
- ytel82 December 2007
Comments
He said hes just a clumsy guy.
^^Can I have this one? It's too cute (Unless you can find an amusing one from the Truth in Dentistry vid?
and of course you can, Tempe!
and I'll also make you a special dentist one, if you want. What motion would amuse you most?
and this really, really sucks- I should not have made it jump; it's irritating- but I figured I'd post it here as an idea type of thing.
edit: yuuuuck! the forum reduced the size and it looks even suckier- the words are not really that ugly when you click on it.
Some people here are really talented and I'd looove to see some of their work- like HMMband's banner is beautiful.
And you can call me Sally if you want, cuz Redstar7's real name is Tabatha, lol.
and this really, really sucks- I should not have made it jump; it's irritating- but I figured I'd post it here as an idea type of thing.
No, the yahtzee one isn't that bad! It's funny!
Lol, not sure which motion would amuse me most, not sure if the Tim dentist one would even fit as an ava/siggie. I'll have to go back and watch it to see.
Keep, them coming, these are wonderful, Tabetha
---littleroom
here he turns into something
and this one is just with a background.
The sad, sad birthday clown!
I couldn't resist the silly, sad one of the kids using Damian as a maypole:
(this last one's heavy to load though, sorry. If you wanna use it, I'll shrink it)
Do you take any special requests?
Like it would be awesome to have one that is of Damian in Invisible right when he is sing, "please use your powers for good" and it is a close up of his face in white.
--- littleroom
Rose, I hate clowns too!
And Theresa, your friend is a genius for having Daman's ass & angels in the same sentence!
Do you take any special requests?
Like it would be awesome to have one that is of Damian in Invisible right when he is sing, "please use your powers for good" and it is a close up of his face in white.
--- littleroom
Sure! Do you want just him singing or that whole movement of the camera zooming in to the band?
Tempe and Theresa- you should totally tell Damian he scares you as a clown! That would be hilarious- I wonder what he would say
That would be AWESOME!!!
I love your little animated avatars/sigs!
--- littleroom
Tempe and Theresa- you should totally Damian he scares you as a clown! That would be hilarious- I wonder what he would say
That would be AWESOME!!!
I love your little animated avatars/sigs!
--- littleroom
I'll get right on it
If you guys want me to teach you how to make them, I'll be glad to. All you need is photoshop. Mine aren't nearly as good as the ones my friend makes- I think one day I'll ask her to make some Ok Go stuff for us.
I love how this forum has no size limit though, hehe, so things can be any size. But if you want things smaller or bigger, let me know.
I am so stupid- just as I was making yours, I realized a completely different technique for making these. And it makes them tons cleaner than in my old method, which makes me want to redo them all. The only thing is, it takes twice the number of frames, so they're really heavy. This one is a whole MB. So I think I still have to practice with this new method so I can get them down to kb's. Big sizes are ok for sigs since luckily there are no sig limits, but avas have to be 50 kb's on this forum.
I'll show you this one for now. Sorry that it's so heavy. When I figure out how to make it as clean but with half the weight, I'll post a new one.
Also, if you want it different in any aspect, let me know.
Edit: well, I shrunk it down to the dimensions set for this forum but it's still way too heavy(I didn't post it). The only thing I can think of is to remove half the frames, which of course will make it less fun to look at. I like how this new method produces much cleaner animations but if anybody needs an avatar-sized animation, it looks like it'll have to be in my old method for now- I'll try to figure it out. Sorry.
THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
I totally want to learn, but I don't have photoshop.
--- littleroom
I am so stupid- just as I was making yours, I realized a completely different technique for making these. And it makes them tons cleaner than in my old method, which makes me want to redo them all. The only thing is, it takes twice the number of frames, so they're really heavy. This one is a whole MB. So I think I still have to practice with this new method so I can get them down to kb's. Big sizes are ok for sigs I guess, but avas have to be 50 kb's on this forum.
I'll show you this one for now. Sorry that it's so heavy. When I figure out how to make it as clean but with half the weight, I'll post a new one.
Also, if you want it different in any aspect, let me know.
Teach me teach me!!!!
Ok
The basic idea of an animated gif is to string together successive frames. For example, if you want an animation of someone jumping, your first frame would be a picture of them on the ground, your second frame would be a picture of them in the air (and if you want it to look more realist, you would have a frame between them as the person between the air and the ground). Then, you would string the frames together and set them to loop. You would have to specify how long each frame displays: for example, you could have the frame of the person on the ground take .05 seconds and the other frames be like .02 seconds so it looks like the person is on the ground for a moment before he jumps. It would be odd though if the one in the air was really long and it would look even worse if you had all the frames displaying for .001 seconds because then it would go so fast that you couldn't see anything. Anyway, that's the basic idea.
Of course, animations of movements more interesting than jumping take more than 3 frames. Most of the time I make animations with 20-40 frames, but these Ok Go animations were more complex and most of them were about 80 frames. (though I've been playing with a method that uses 200 frames, which is what I used for Littleroom's- that's why it was so heavy). I would recommend sticking to around 20 frames. Firefox (how I love thee, Firefox!) can handle anything but Explorer (bleh, I hate Explorer) tends to slow down gifs that are more than around 20 frames. Cuz Explorer is stupid like that. So people with slow internet connection see gifs of more than 20 frames as slow and not smooth.
Which brings us to the next thing. I didn't draw 80 Ok Go pictures for each animation, hehe- what I did was use screencaps. If you've never made screencaps before, press the "printscreen" button to the right of F12 on your keyboard. Then go into Paint and click paste: voila, you've made an image of whatever's displayed on your screen. In theory, then, all you need to do is play an Ok Go video and hit "printscreen" over and over. In reality, that's not such a good idea for making animations cuz there's no way you can click paste and then printscreen in time for the next movement...although, thinking about it, I just lied. Just like you can make a person jump by
either 2 frames (up and down) or 3 frames (up, down, and in between) you can usually get away with only significant parts of a gesture and completely skip the parts in between. Later, when you string them together, if you do the timing right it should still look like 1 smooth movement. But I still wouldn't recommend "printscreen." If you have WMM, which comes with most Windows, you will see a little camera icon. Scroll to the movement you want. Hit the camera button and save the image. Click the arrow to move 1 frame. Repeat. Another way is to use PowerDVD. It's not just for DVD's. I love PowerDVD because it lets you set the dimensions of your images- but be careful! Enlarging an image too much will make it pixellated!!
The next step is to have all your images saved as gifs. If you are using WMM, everything is saved as jpg or bmp, I forget which, but neither of these is what you want. You MUST convert to gif. I like to use Photoshop or Fireworks to convert formats, cuz then you can use a batch script. Batch script allows you to do a ton of images at the same time. This is also the time to edit your images- write text on it, for example, or change the size. Well, actually you can also do those things afterward, but only up until you optimize it.
If you're just making a person jump, this is all a quick process, but if you're doing something with a ton of frames, be prepared to spend time. Def'ly use batch scripts whenever possible. As you practice, you'll find yourself going thru everything a lot faster.
If, however, you plan on using more than a few frames from a video, import the clip directly into Photoshop and it will automatically make the frames.
Ok, so, the next thing is to string your frames together. There are many ways of doing this- I used to use Corel Paint Shop Pro until I switched to Photoshop. I highly recommend Corel because it is 6 billion times more user-friendly than Photoshop. You can seriously use Corel without reading the manual, but with Photoshop reading is a must. There are other companies, of course, some of which have surpassed everything I'm telling you (according to what I've read about) but I haven't tried these out yet so I can't recommend them. ImageReady is what can be called an extension of the old version of Photoshop- it does everything Photoshop does, connects you to Photoshop for editing, and focuses on moving images. However, if you get the new version of Photoshop, there is no need for ImageReady. Anyway, if you use Photoshop, it's fairly easy to string your frames: just bring up your animation window and drag your 80 frames in- do this successively, and make absolutely sure your layers are in the same position and all the same size! Also, you may have to hide underneath the layer you are working with- do this by clicking the eye next to the layer number.
And now you can play with display time. And make sure your animation is set to loop, not just play once.
And now for what I think is the hardest part, and what I'm still struggling with: optimization. The web displays colors differently from how you see them when you're not on the web. An animation that looks great in Photoshop can look bland and yucky when you actually upload it to the web. There's no set formula for how to deal with this; it depends on the colors you use in your animation. So, just play with dithering and your other optimization settings until you get something that works. When you save, do not go to "save as." Well, I mean, you can do that but it'll only save your psp file which you don't need unless you plan on editing later. Go to "save optimized" and make sure you change "default" to "custom"! That's a common mistake and it really brings irritating results.
Oh, and remember I said you could edit up until optimization? If you wanna make something smaller (which is always a good solution for reducing a pixellated look) you can do that in Photoshop too. If you do it in another program like Fireworks, make sure you open the file as an animated gif and not as a regular gif, which is a common mistake that reeeally hurts you later. But if you change colors after you optimize, well, that just ruins everything you just did.
Well, I guess that's it. If you want to put your animation in a still banner, that's hard to explain but I'll tell you what I know if you want.
If anyone here wants to share other techniques, that'd be awesome. But if you're only doing a simple motion that takes only a few frames, like a dinosaur you drew dancing or even Ok Go jumping, then you really don't need to get into more complex methods.
sorry this was so long.
Edit: A list of programs you can use: Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro or Gimp. Gimp is free. Photoshop is around $600 (I paid $300 with my student discount), but you can get a free trial version. Paint Shop Pro is comparable. I can't help ppl using the last two though, cuz I'm a Photoshop person myself, but I've heard a lot of good things about them.
youre really talented... i tried makeing one of these before... but i failed horribly. could I put a couple of these on my myspace? I'll credit you fo sho.