It’s a big file, but big is beautiful in this case. Feast your eyes on this animated magazine cover which is a more literal interpretation of the June 1975 issue of the classic Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine (more of a fanzine, really) featuring the scene from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) that is famous for the first of Ray Harryhausen’s legendary animated skeletons. You can see the original cover below, which interestingly has a few things wrong if you want to get literal. Namely, the color of Sinbad’s pants, the orientation of the fight, and the fact that the skeleton hadn’t lost its sheild just yet. This was a total blast to do, and I am working on a fullblown tutorial, but I must have spent four or five hours on it already, so I will simply leave it here to animate into eternity.
I am digging this poster style, large and moving like that Pulp Fiction one you linked me to yesterday. So did you do some magic wand selecting of the text, inverting to get the clean background? It is big and bold and sword slashing…
Alan,
yeah, it was actually pretty easy—I just fussed with it for hours. I shifted and selected all the text from the magazine from a copy of the original image of the magazine cover, and put it all on its own layer. Then it was simply a matter of upscaling the video stills to 1280 (the film version I had was 640 px by 320 px) to meet the strange proportions of the magazine. I imported the video as layers in Photoshop 🙂 and then just made the text image the upper most layer and animated the 50 + frames for the GIF. I then spent hours centering, cropping, and filling in the top and bottom bars with a dark color. I learned a ton about animating GIFs in Photoshop, which is nice because I had no previous experience, and I am a bit more sympathetic to your missing that program. Don’t you like how I talk out of both sides of my mouth 🙂
In the end, it’s an overly large animated GIF, but at the same time I think it is the work in ds106 that I am most proud of to this day. At least until the next one.
Holy s***! That’s amazing!
Falling deeper and deeper into the animated GIF rabbit hole. Killer loop point you discovered. Your Photoshop chops are getting way, way up there, this is 50+ frames of awesomeness.