This week, though I feel more in my element with many of the potential assignments, I wanted to try to challenge myself with something new. I’ve never really tried animation that isn’t pixel art, but I’ve certainly never tried creating my own gif using sticky notes like this. I won’t lie, it’s not the prettiest thing I’ve ever made. Unfortunately, while I feel that I’m very creative, I typically stick to things like graphic design and don’t do much drawing. I have in the past and have made some neat stuff but typically that takes days and days of dedication and scrapping over and over again. This assignment had me go through a very similar process but over a shorter span of time. I spent a while brainstorming ideas for the animation and scrapped multiple attempts. Ultimately, I decided that since I was having trouble drawing anyways, I might as well revisit a character I drew when I was about 5 or 6. His name is Bubble Blower, and as the name implies, he blows bubbles. He’s a lot like if Squidward were drawn more human but also a lot more poorly. Because I knew the character wouldn’t look very good, I wanted to play around with the idea of dynamic bubbles, making them grow, shift slightly, and fade off the screen as new ones rise up from below. I think I achieved this really well with the beginning set of bubbles, but I’ll admit that the final blow from Bubble Blower isn’t ass smooth as I’d have liked it. In retrospect, it probably needed another frame or two for bubbles to disperse and change more fluidly. Regardless, here’s the final outcome!

I was challenged to make a short animation using the old-school sticky note technique. This technique, also known as flipbook animation is made by creating numerous successive images and viewing them in a quick motion so that they form a sequence.

Like with stop-motion, the process of making a flipbook animation involves creating countless images to create just a few seconds of video. This time-consuming animation can take days, months, and even years to complete. In fact, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas took over three years to complete. There is a good reason you don’t see too many stop-motion films. I, myself, ended up using 75 sticky notes to create a four-second GIF/video. Let’s give some respect to my man Tim Burton.

I had to keep my concept pretty simple, so I only told the story with three objects: a cliff, a stick figure, and a pair of wings. After making the cards, I set up an amateur camera stand to take photos of each card while keeping the camera in the same position. I combined the photos into a video on my iPhone and then uploaded them into a video editor on my computer to speed it up. I used Giphy to make it into a GIF and I also uploaded the video onto YouTube. I am really happy with my final product. What I am not happy with is the fact that the pink Post-it Notes left pink residue on my hands, mouse, the table. Not cool Post-it. NOT COOL.

For the second gif assignment this week, I chose to do a sticky note animation. I have fun making little animations in the flipnote app on my 3DS, but it’s been a long time since I’ve actually made a real flipbook. I’m gonna go ahead and show you the finished product right away, because OH BOY do I have a LOT to say about the process of this one. I had some trouble, to say the least. BIG frowny face!

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I knew the entire time that I wanted to make a cat-related gif. All the animations I’ve made in flipnote have been cats. This is one I’m particularly proud of… it’s not the greatest in the world (I’m no artist) but I think it’s cute.

I love my cat. I love every cat we’ve ever had, but they’ve all done this same thing. As soon as they think they’ll get away with it, they start scratching whatever they want. It could be the arm of a sofa, the leg of a table, or literally just the wall. One of our sofas is totally frayed on one side because of the cat, and can you guess what’s sitting right next to that sofa? A freaking scratching post. Why are they like this? They love destruction.

The process for this started simple, as you’d expect. It’s kind of embarrassing, but it took some getting used to plain old pencil-and-paper drawing again. When I made a mistake, my left hand kept trying to go “Ctrl+Z.” Undo!!! Wait, erase!!!

I then took photos of each individual sticky note, which would create the frames of my gif. I emailed the photos to myself so I’d have them waiting for me on my laptop, where I opened them all up in Paint.net (my go-to editing software, even though it’s not the best) to crop and resize them. Once I had them all the size that I wanted, I again followed the DS106 Wiki‘s guide for making gifs.

Despite the help I found online regarding frame duration, the edits I made to each individual frame, and how good it looked in the preview, when I exported the gif and uploaded it… it looked like this.

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I was VERY displeased. I had spent a lot of time editing each frame’s duration, and none of it ended up taking. Blech. So what I ended up doing is probably kind of extreme. What should have been a 14 frame gif is now something like 50 frames. To make the frames that I wanted to last longer, well, longer, I just inserted duplicates.

Welcome to a tiny bull chase, featuring two inked-in cowboys and a round little bull. This GIF assignment, which has you draw an animation sticky note style and convert it into a GIF, gave room for plenty of creativity. In my own version, I wanted to capture something like the cowboy’s biggest issue in the Wild West — keeping the cattle calm and in line with one another. Moving them across the wide regions of the southwest to the railroads up north was dangerous, and the effort and risk necessary to do it made for great stories. Chasing down the loose cattle and making sure nothing else went wrong was a real struggle. I made an effort to capture a simplified version of this kind of scene in my sticky note animation, which was a lot of fun to create! It was also a lot of editing, picture-taking, and GIF-creating which my computer admittedly did not enjoy as much.

The assignment prompt’s request was simple, and despite my limited understanding of GIFs and photo editing, I really wanted to try it out. After putting together this simple little western-inspired scene on my sticky notes, I had to take pictures. The sticky notes were all too happy to curl up at the bottom, hence the pencil in each shot (sorry, I know it looks a little messy). Once I got the notes under control and the camera settings just right, I had to switch out the scenes shot-by-shot without moving the camera around too much. Almost everything shifted between each picture.

So, once I uploaded all of the photos, I had to adjust and crop them so that they aligned better. This probably took the longest — mostly because my computer was not happy with me trying to move and save photos all within the same Paint.Net document. Once all of that was complete, I had to switch over to a GIF-making program. After extensive research, I used GIMP according to the how-to guide this course’s handbook graciously provided. It was a long and confusing process, but I came out knowing a lot more about GIFs than I thought I ever could.

This process was a great learning experience, and aside from trying to navigate programs for the first time, it was a great deal of fun.