My animation: texTTure and QAS lockdown

I've finally uploaded a "higher quality" video to YouTube - and I like the results. The upload is my abstract animation texTTure (2008) which was screened at Quickdraw Animation Society's GIRAF 4 animation festival.





I made this movie by saving sequential frames from Photoshop 4 and Photoshop 7, then processing images with Photoshop filters and compositing elements together. I animated the wipes that make the transitions between the "looks" by hand as well.

Saving sequential frames and naming them manually would be a real drag and very slow - if I hadn't written a helper program, StopMotion FrameCollector. I set up a Photoshop action to save a copy of my image and assigned the action to a function key. c watches a target folder, and every time one of the Photoshop saves shows up, FrameCollector renames it as a six digit sequential number. Animating in Photoshop (or any paint program, for that matter) becomes just like clicking the shutter button on a single frame movie camera. Quick!

And speaking of quick - Quickdraw Animation Society is holding an Animation Lockdown - a 48 hour animation challenge on May 15 to 18, 2009. I've submitted my entry as an individual and plan to animate using my FrameCollector method. It'll be a challenge - especially since I intend to post small reports on what I'm doing to this blog during the Lockdown.

A New Kind of Classic Animation?

Or maybe it's just a new class of animation software. Since I last posted, I've been working on new programs for the Mac and Windows, another web site, and animating using my new programs.

The animated GIF above (which links to my new site, How-To-Make-Your-Own-Animation) is an example of this new type of animation. I don't have a good phrase that sums up what's going on, but it's all about creating the animation frames in paint software - any paint software (and some other programs).

That's always been possible - if you saved the image repeatedly with a new, sequential file name every time you save it. I've done that for a few very short animations and naming each file correctly, manually, completely breaks my artistic concentration. (Richard Williams: "Animation is concentration.")

So I wrote a helper program: StopMotion FrameCollector. Click on the animation below to find out more.



These GIFS were created by saving frames sequentially in Photoshop 7 - which has no built-in animation features, unlike Photoshop CS3 and CS4. You can see the power of Photoshop for animation - I've got drop shadows and layers going on, as well as squash and stretch and motion blur in the top animation. The second animation is nothing fancy, but here's another one showing layers. The technique can be used for any movie format - these animations just happen to be GIFs.