JD Photography

To begin in animation is to begin like any other form of media. There is a pre-production phase where you brainstorm your ideas, do your homework on the subject, and start a creative brief. Identify the who, what, when, why, and how you’re going to cover.

Liz Blazer writes in her book, “Animated Storytelling, Simple Steps For Creating Animation & Motion Graphics, “Storytelling is as old as dirt. People have been making up stories since cave dwelling times. Our brains are wired to make connections and find narratives.”

There are several ways to go about developing a story. Blazer suggests the improvisational comedy rule of “yes, and…” to keep building on the ideas that come to mind. Good and bad ideas, keep them flowing and you’re story develops.

Blazer’s gives three exercises to help craft the story.

1. The elevator Pitch

2. Six-word story

3. Tagline

Focusing in on tone, plot, and theme, these exercises should help you discover your story.

The bottom line with any visual medium is being able to convey a story. At the end of the day we are storytellers and therefore we need to make sure that story comes across. 

I find my inspiration in humor. What are things that make me laugh? If I laugh, that where I go.

I like using animals for reactions.

I like how this has simple animation but looks really cool and probably took a little while to create.

Some gifs hit hard, physically and emotionally.

Here is a good retro Jerry laughing to respond to someone who sent you something worthy of something more than just a LOL.

I didn’t do this for this week, but incorporating text into a gif can help drive the message home.

For this week, I challenged myself to create gifs. This is a new venture for me so please be kind. My first is a string of photos from my first 1/2 marathon I ran. I put 10 similar photographs together and looped them to create my first gif.

This next gif took the most time because I used Adobe Animator to create a sunrise and sunset. There is so much more I could do with this to make it better, however it is a very time consuming process.

Finally, I used a recent photo I took and wanted to make it look fancy. I created different layers and added an effect between the background and foreground to make it dazzle a little. Not sure if it works for this particular image, but it was great practice.