The 3D GIF has been my absolute favourite to craft! I've really enjoyed the tactile element of making my character out of recycled clay from the ceramics workshop (yay sustainability!), translating him from sketchbook page to three dimensional reality. I naturally have very warm hands so the clay was easily mouldable and effortless to pull bits off and add bits on to get him just right. Air drying Mr. Squidge naturally did add an extra day to the production of my GIF, but I didn't want to fire or glaze him, adding a sense of vulnerability and fragility, incase he cracked. I had already spent some time making sure he represented the drawn version, and didn't want to make 3 models again because of the firing process going wrong! I painted him with 3 coats of acrylic paint to make sure all
I wrestled with the idea of crocheting my character or using cut paper, but these are processes I am now very familiar with and wanted to push myself in the direction of model making which is still very new to me. The background was made with cut paper in a very freeform manner to translate the funky jungle from the digital version to balance out Mr. Squidge's 3D qualities. I really like the opposing senses of harmony and playfulness in the background, which contrast with Mr. Squidge who is quite a downtrodden character± I think he has been rendered successfully and model-making is something I want to consider more as I continue to experiment and test ideas as an illustrator.
One drawback is that it was difficult to balance Mr. Squidge while he moves between the 3 versions of model. When creating him I didn't know whether to film him on his side or while he was sat up... His side was easier but his figures rocked around a little bit and I had to eliminate a lot of frames where my hand or shadow were present; giving it a bit of a clunky, lo-fi, stop-motion effect. I didn't like this at first as I wanted the transition to be as smooth as possible as in my other GIFs, but accepted the outcome and find it has a unique quality to it.
Test GIFs
From the demonstration it was explained that using a HD camera may cause banding and dithering when the images are optimised, so decided to use the image burst feature on my phone instead - so that no quality would be lost. It needed cropping from landscape to square dimensions which was tricky as I didn't want to lose any of Mr. Squidge's body parts in the process!
I couldn't decide between a GIF more more or less frames telling the story and had to make the decision to go with the smaller amount of frames for a smaller file size. The story is still the same but the transition isn't as smooth and results in a more stop-motion aesthetic.
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