AnimatedGIF Assignment #1

“Van Gogh painted the view from his east-facing window in the asylum 21 times.”

https://www.vincentvangogh.org/starry-night.jsp

I chose to animate The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh into a gif. I didn’t think I was going to put literal stars in the sky, until I began reading more about the paintings history. He painted it in 1889 from his room in the mental asylum. The painting depicts his view from his window. Van Gogh didn’t think this painting would gain much success, however now it’s one of the most well known paintings in the world. Since it’s so well known, many people have theories about this painting. One theory being, the cypress tree symbolizes death, which can be linked to Van Gogh’s suicide. This is part of the reason I chose this painting (the other reason being this painting is the one I’m most familiar with).

I chose to light up Van Gogh’s view to show there’s light at the end of the tunnel. In “The Joy of Painting,” part of the joy is seeing others feel joy for your work. Though many of the theories behind The Starry Night are just that, theories, Van Gogh still had doubts about his work. However, he must have seen some potential if he had painted it 21 times, and wanted it to be “perfect.” By having light in the dark, it allows people to see; but maybe in this case, I added light in respect to Van Gogh to help him see the potential he didn’t see at the time. When lighting up the houses, it sort of shows the many people in the world that appreciate his art. And lastly, when lighting up the sky with stars, it shows the beauty that’s found naturally within.

The process of making this was… interesting. I’m really only familiar with the photoshop app Picsart, so I used that to create the stars in the sky, and light up the houses at the bottom of the hill. However, I did it into 2 separate images (one image consisted of just stars, another image consisted of a different placement for the stars, but also the lights in the houses). I did this to show more movement within the picture, and show the progressions that happen at night. My next step was turning it into a GIF, which I’m not sure if I used the correct app to do this; but I used the app GIF Maker to combine all three images (the original Starry Night painting, edit 1, and edit 2). The app was extremely easy to navigate, and gave me so many different options for making a GIF. Once my GIF was complete, I simply downloaded it and put it in here!

This assignment help me feel very inspired, and find joy within the things I do even if I don’t see potential in them.

Design Assignment #1: Animate a Classic Painting (4 stars)

For this assignment, I chose to use The Scream by Edvard Munch to animate. I either wanted to animate the figure’s screaming face, or the boat in the background. I felt like animating the boat would bring more attention to the background of the painting. To create the animation, I saved a picture of the painting and uploaded it into GIMP as a layer. Using the selection tool I cut and saved a picture of the boat as a new image. I then used the clone stamp tool to remove the boat from the picture. I duplicated this “blank boat” layer adding the separate boat image into each frame, making the boat move a little to the left in each frame.

Problems
I was very mad at myself for forgetting that each frame only represents an eighth of a second of the animation. I realized this after exporting the GIF animation and playing it back. The boat is going crazy! If the boat had gone slower (duplicating each frame 8 times) the animation would look more believable. This was a lesson learned!

I absolutely love making GIFs, so I decided that it would be appropriate to make an AnimatedGIF Assignment. I kind of wish this assignment could also fall under two categories, but I guess it’s not that big of a deal. You can find the assignment here and all you have to do is turn a classic painting into an animated GIF like the one I made below.