Visual Communication: Studio Brief 1 - Digital GIF Development

I found the process of drawing on my Wacom tablet and tracing over the previous frame, as I would have done with the light box, much easier and less time consuming than drawing in an analogue fashion. Construction lines can be erased quickly and any imperfections can be corrected in seconds. It was so beneficial to have tools at my disposal such as rotate and transform to move Mr. Squidge how I wanted to with ease to adapt him to the the storyboard I was working with. Moving him too much made his outline pixelated though, as the process went on, which meant I had to go through each of the frames and redraw his outlines. Ack! This added more time than I would have liked but ensured that his transition through the frames was smoother; looking more professional in the end. Working digitally also enabled me to get the pixel proportions, colour mode and resolution right at the beginning.

Another thing I found much easier was that I could just use the colour picker tool to capture the colours from my hand-drawn GIF, rather than having to paint each and every frame and ensuring the shade is accurate to the previous drawing. Creating my GIF digitally was the most easiest approach in terms of time constraints, accuracy and freedom of translation but it wasn't necessarily the most fun to produce as it didn't present me with too many challenges!

I wanted to have a fun background with my digital GIF that told the story of the funky jungle I pictured in my mind when listening to Weather Report. I tried to pick muted pastels so that they didn't wrestle with Mr. Squidge for attention and the main focus is on him and his mishaps. I found the colours didn't work too well alongside such a bright character, so changed the level to Overlay to make the jungle more subtle.

Again something was missing and I looked back to Lilli Carré's work with her amazing textures. I lightly erased some of the background away with a gouache brush from Kyle Brush and added a dusty texture I created in the Visual Narratives module set to 'Screen'. This gave the GIF a more distressed, aged look which I enjoy a lot, informed by my picture book research and development, providing connotations of the past to match the song as it was released in the early '80s.