GIF experimentation

 I have never tried creating a GIF in Procreate software, therefore before starting creating a gif for each of the characters, I decided to try doing a test to see how exactly the software works and what are the limitations for it. I wanted to see if there are any sort of obstacles that I will need to fins a way to go around. 

I started by turning on the animation option in procreate in the Canvas menu on the top of the screen. 

This is what the menu looked like and I just needed to turn on the animation assist. I could have created a gif without it, but I thought, especially since it is my first time doing so, I would benefit from using the assistant. I was right the assistant tool was useful. The option turned on a timeline with frames at the bottom and whenever I would click on a frame, it would immediately lower the opacity of all the other frames. Generally in procreate, the animation option works based on layers. Each layer is a separate frame, therefore it would be possible for me to create the motion without the assistance, but I would need to worry myself about the opacity of the other layers. The animation assist option definitely helped me. 

For my test GIF I decided to make a really simple GIF of a bouncing ball. The bouncing ball exercise is really good to also practice a principle of animation called stretch and squash. I also thought that it would not be too time consuming therefore I decided on a simple ball. 

I started by drawing the horizon line and the ball in the air. I copied it and pasted it onto another frame, where I would deform it a little bit to get the actual squash and stretch of the object when encountering the ground. I think it was a good practice for me to to think about the physics of the animated objects. 

When I clicked on the next frame, as I mentioned before, the opacity of the frame before would lower itself to give me the sense of what I have just drawn. 

This is how it looked like. At the bottom I had a timeline where I could press play to see how the movement works and if it is smooth enough. I like having the option to immediately see what I am working on because that lets me quickly correct any mistakes I may have created by accident. For example I forgot to copy the horizon line in most of my frames and because of the ability to immediately look at the result, I could have easily fix the mistake. 

When I worked the ball to the ground and started making the ball go up, I got a notification from Procreate that I used the maximum amount of layers and that threw me off. I was not aware that Procreate had a maximum of layers be 26 and that means the maximum amount of frames for my GIF. I was not ready for that, and nor was my animation. I have only completed three quarters of this small GIF and I could not finish it. I was not quite sure how to overcome the obstacle. I exported the unfinished GIF and this is how it looked like:

This GIF is not smooth because of the gap and the few missing frames. I was not sure exactly what to do in this situation. I decided to export also the frames I did not get a chance to combine in this GIF as a separate GIF and try to combine them in some sort of way. 

I did some looking around the internet for a tool for me to combine two GIFs into one. I found a website called Veed.io that had a tool to do so. 

I uploaded both of the GIFs to the website and exported them together as one GIF. It was pretty simple. 

The movement is smooth, but something very weird happened to the pixels in the background. They look like some sort of checker pattern which is definitely not something I planned on. I think it may be caused by the website, therefore I am planning on looking into different websites that do the same job but hopefully do not ruin the visuals of my GIF. 

I decided to try this one more website called ofoct.com. The description of the website said that it would merge two GIFs into one therefore I decided to give it go. I had to upload both of the GIFs and put them in the order that I wanted them to be merged in. 

It seems that the merging process went really well in this case, therefore it is most likely I will be using this website over the one I tried before. I am glad I tried two different options to see pros and cons of using them.