My Animated Cardboard Persona | Behind the Scenes
2Video Description:
This video is an overview/behind the scenes recording of how I animated my new "!Hydrate" coffee drinking GIF for my livestreaming overlay.
Note:
When my webcam is turned on, "!Hydrate" produces a text block in the chat to remind me to drink something. When my cardboard persona is active, when viewers use "!Hydrate" I can manually interact/trigger the GIF. This is just an entertaining feature I wanted to add to help provide an incentive to stick around when I'm not visible during streams.
I may add more features/interactions to the cutout.
How I did it:
Step 1 - Take a photo of myself in my natural pose and edit the outline to look more like a cardboard cutout.
Step 2 - Tape a fake/slightly see through coffee cup onto the cutout.
Step 3 - Add a cursor that drags a new separate copy of the same cup in front of the cutout.
Step 4 - Tilt the coffee cup and animate pouring out coffee onto a flat surface.
Step 5 - Add a bubble to represent how Cardboard Mandy is feeling.
Step 6 - Loading dots.
Step 7 - Draw a smiley face, erase little bits of the face at a time through separate frames, and then reverse the order of the frames to make it appear like the smiley is appearing from nothing.
This process took 1 day, 250 frames (Maximum Number of Layers allowed), and 120 Frames (frames include groups of photos grouped together.)
The way animating a GIF in procreate works, is that every visible layer or group, in order from the bottom up, creates a sequence of frames that when combined, make a GIF. You can adjust the speed in which the frames are played to make the GIF shorter/faster or longer/slower.
A handy trick to make sure each motion is clearly visible is to duplicate frames/groups over and over again for as long as you need an action to be visible. For example: When I animated the smiley face, I had to make sure to duplicate the final smiling frame several times to make sure the GIF wouldn't start over again with only a split second of the smiley being visible/hard to see.
How Long Have I Been Animating?
Several years ago when I got my first Wacom Bamboo tablet (retail value around $30 USD) it came with free animating software. That was my first time dabbling with the concept of animation where I drew a shark swimming threw a river, where it eventually leaps out of the water and lands with its teeth around a person on land.
I stopped doing any sort of animating after that experiment until years later, on April 3 2021, when I decided to revisit it with Procreate on my iPAD Pro. My first GIF was a very simple winking poo GIF, but the wink looked more like an eye twitch. This experimental GIF was a joke.
Then my next GIFS were my "New Follower" alert (the fan), and the "Now Hosting" alert (the tv with text changing overtime). These 2 GIFS and a separate non-animated graphic (also being used in my streams) were featured in the outro of this video (in the "Now Playing" window).
Music Used:
Artist - Ofshane
Song - Koto San
Sound Effect:
Category - Office
Title - Typing on Keyboard
#animated #gif #showcase
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/WaryWelder
Twitch:
https://www.twitch.tv/macabremandy
Thanks for watching!