Animated GIF

First of all what is animation exactly?

Animation is a metamorphosis produced by a lot of frames which are put together. It has its own language.

But what is metamorphosis?

Metamorphosis is the ability to facilitate the change from one form into another without edit.

The quote “Imagination is subversive, because it puts the possible against the real. That’s why you should always use your wildest imagination. Imagination is the biggest gift humanity

has received. Imagination makes people human, not work. Imagination, imagination,

imagination...”

by Jan Svankmajer, a Czech film maker and artist, inspired me a lot because he basically says that everybody has to have a childish imagination and be creative and that beeing human is the best gift in the work.

The task ask us to create a GIF produced with maximal 25 frames.

Our first idea was to go against the viewer expectations and draw a man jumping off a cliff but instead of dying he flies back to the edge of the cliff after him growing wings.

The image should be drawn simple so there would be a stick man, a cliff and some clouds. The main idea about animation is to create a metamorphosis and not a drawing work of art.

We overthought our idea because we were not happy with it. Therefore we added some details. The man should jump off the cliff as a skinny man but come back with wings as a fat man. So there would be an unexpected change as well.

The problem of our idea was that we had to create a looping GIF which would look odd because the fat man would fly down the cliff as soon as it reverse.

In addition we were asking ourselves what our main message in that GIF should be. The answer to that question was hope and reversed desperation.

Based on that we figured out that the message would be hard to understand if we would produce our GIF as we were planning on doing it. Referring to the GIF we wanted to keep it simple and clear. That lead us to a new brainstorming.

When I think of hope I think about wings, white, freedom and simplicity. Therefore we changed our idea into a “thing” which changes into a human with wings. To highlight the message we outlined the man and added some details to the wings.

I learned about drawing animation that it is all about metamorphosis and creativity. It is important to surprise the viewer with the unexpected. The key word for this project was simplicity because it is not meant to be a master piece of painting but a short video that catches the viewers attention and encourage them to think. It is also ment to have a funny character in it.