ILLU Project 3: 4D Gifs

Introduction to 4D

To ease us from 3D into the realms of 4D, we started with a simple task: to create a rotational self portrait in gif format. I lack experience in the field of digital art, which I'll discuss later, so my attempt was really simplistic. But it was useful to get a feel, however basic, for what was required in the project to come.

I drew the frames traditionally and took photos of them to transfer them into gif form. Below you can see some of the analogue sketches alongside the finished digital gif.

​Moving into our 4D project, the task was to create ten animated gifs. The yeargroup brainstormed lockdown themes together; themes our gifs were to then be based on. As per usual, there were a few rules to follow:

• each gif was to be 500x500px
• only six hexadecimal colours were to be used (in short: standard red, green, blue, yellow, black and white)
• each gif had to have a certain number of frames (2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15 and 20)

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Getting Started

I am a huge fan of animation and animated movies - be it traditional, digital, stopmotion, whatever. Animation is one of my biggest influences, alongside the storyboarding and concept art development behind completed films, so naturally I am keen to learn the workings of it. However, despite my excitement, I was really nervous to move into 4D territory.

Admittedly, prior to this module, I had practically not touched the digital medium. Photoshop, animation and digital art in general are all completely new to me, and are areas I am neither confident nor competent in. I knew from the start that my attempt at this project would be pretty damn rubbish, but I consoled myself with the fact that I'm here to learn how to improve on that.
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Analogue Development

Ironically, despite being so terrible at digital art and animation, I can visualise and "direct" moving scenes in my head pretty clearly. I think being such a fan of films, books and graphic novels, I have a decent sense of how a scene should flow; I just lack the actual skill to execute it. Regardless, all that time spent staring out bus windows and visualising music videos and fight scenes paid off in the sense that I was not short of ideas.

I narrowed down my theme ideas to the  ten I felt best suited gif format. I then laid them all these provisional "scene" concepts out on paper and assigned gif lengths to each; this process can be seen in my lecture notes at the foot of this post. Once the ideas were finalised, I moved on to create "storyboards" for each gif consisting of frame thumbnails.
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analogue thumbnails and frame planning

This was where I had to move out of my comfort zone and use photoshop. I found it really difficult at first; even with the basics training in previous IT lectures, I found it difficult to navigate the tools and brushes. It took me quite a while to get a basic grip on it, but eventually I began to feel a little more confident. I even started to enjoy the feel of digital drawing and the multitude of tools available on photoshop - I am looking forward to learning more and improving my skills digitally for future projects.

Putting the completed frames into motion was quite fun, and I think with a lot of practice I will be able to build on what I've learned here. One thing I will say I actively disliked about this project was the colour limitation. I am really not a fan of bold, bright schemes like this and found it difficult to force myself to stick to it - but that in itself was good practice. After all, in a professional setting, you can't turn around and tell a client "I don't like these requirements so I'm going to do something different". I have to be comfortable with pushing my own boundaries. 

​Below are my completed gifs.

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lecture notes