By Adam Humston
For this assignment we were tasked with creating a 3-5 second GIF which reflects how social media has an impact on our lives. We also had to include some element of ‘symbiosis’ within the design as well as producing a short 2 minute video explaining the entire design process.
The first step I took was to research and brainstorm some ideas. I came up with an idea which shows a character dreaming of social media which shows us that this character which represents us, is consistently thinking of social media throughout the day. Now that I had an idea of the setting of my GIF, which was in a bedroom, I began to look at some bedroom illustrations on Pinterest. This site is very good when researching design ideas as you can collect and allocate lots of different imagery that I like into a folder, keeping all my research in one place. When I found a lot of different images that I liked, I began to start designing my stills that I would use for my GIF.
The application that I used to design the GIF was Illustrator and the reason I decided on using this application was because I knew that I would be working a lot with shapes as I would be building my stills from the ground up. I contemplated using Photoshop to make my stills but knew that using premade images and editing them would be more complex and time consuming. In total I had 2 stills, a still which represents night and the other during the day/morning. I did this as I wanted to show through a different setting that the timing has changed which can be seen through the window within the GIF. Once my 2 stills had been made, I used a website called PhotoMosh to glitch my stills. To do this I had exported my stills as JPEGS and imported them into the website and began to add my effects. PhotoMosh was good as it offered a lot of different settings. I decided to use the Jitter effect as It looked exactly how I wanted the glitch to look. After my stills and the glitch effect had been applied to them, the next step was to include some text-based art. I decided to use a cat as my text-based art as it is something which would generally be found in a bedroom and fits the scene well. I used a website called ASCII Art Archive and this site was very good as it supplies a lot of different text-based art styles.
After I had my stills created in Illustrator, I took my stills and imagery in to After Effects. I used this app as I had experience with making short, animated films and gifs using it before. I found editing the GIF together with the images I made to be challenging at times but a good learning experience as I used some tools which I hadn’t used before.