Making a GIF using Photoshop

For this assignment, I was challenged to make an animation using photoshop. The first step was to make a story board, and I knew that I wanted to experiment with puppet warp to try and animate a creature running, so I kept the story board simple. I found a picture of this creature (bottom right) while looking for something to animate, since I would not really be able to draw it myself with a trackpad. It was not until I started animating that I realized the impossible goal I had set for myself, I only had one weekend, and with all my other work, I decided I would give myself only one day to do it all. Having never made an animation before, it took me a while to get the hang of how to make one on photoshop. To keep everything organized I made two documents, one on which I would put together each frame and another where I would put all the frames together using Photoshop's animation features.

I woke up Saturday morning and got to work, the first step would be to take the original image and break it into different parts, each leg got split into a different layer and both the mane and tail got split into five parts, but I left the head and body alone so that I would not have to worry about as much. I then took the layers for the legs, duplicated, and re-patterned them so that they could be used on either the far or near side, giving me more material to work with. Then I started making groups of layers, one for each of the 10 planed frames. Next, I started using puppet warp to re-configure the legs and hair, but I could never get it quite right with puppet warp and it gave things really weird proportions, so I had to make a lot of edits. I would have been better off scrapping it and just re-drawing each layer instead of trying to warp, edit, then stitch all the parts together. When I had finally finished and put the frames in sequence, something still looked off, and after looking at a video of an animal running (because I had not looked at it beforehand, thinking I knew what an animal running looked like...) I realized that I had gotten quite a few things wrong and when combined with all the weird proportions, it just made for a strange looking GIF. But by this time, I had been sitting down for the past 14 hours animating, pausing only to eat a quick lunch, so I decided to go with what I had.

This is the final animation:

It is more of a rough draft, I know it does not look very good, but I did not have the time nor skill to make anything more professional looking at the time.

It might look kind of weird, but I am still very proud of making such a complicated animation in a single day. Even though the process was grueling, I can't say that there was anything specific that I did not like about making the animation, and when I had finished, it did not feel like 14 hours had passed by, it kind of just ate through my time. I really enjoyed learning how to make an animation and I now have a much better understanding of how to use the puppet warp tool, but I don't know if I could do this again in a day. This project was a great learning experience, and I now have a much better appreciation for animators and all the work that goes into an animation.