I decided to do another design assignment since the last one was such a success!

This time I picked the movie location poster one, but I decided to animate it.

The movie: The Princess Bride.

The location:

It is all grey-scale, and on the very darkest end of the scale. The idea was to preserve the gloomy, oppressive nature of the torture chamber, and I think it worked pretty well. I made the cogs radially symmetric around each cog, so that I only had to animate the rotation of the distance of one spoke.

The entire animation is only five frames, but it loops seamlessly. The whole picture is limited to 8 colors, and I used a patterned dither rather than a gradient-based one so that it looks more artistic and abstract, rather than literal.

The low number of colors and frames make for a fairly quick, smooth animation, especially considering its size. I’ll be curious to see how it does on other computers, and especially with less solid internet connections. My guess is that it’ll be a little slow to download, and once it’s cached it’ll run fine pretty much anywhere.

Despite the simplicity of the design, the final Photoshop document is 14 layers deep. Most of them are repeat layers for the animation (I copied a layer for each cog, for each frame of the animation. There might be a better way to do it, but this wasn’t too bad). I don’t do this kind of stuff very often, so it took me a bit longer than I’d anticipated, but I think the result is pretty cool.

I thought about making a poster for the Cliffs of Insanity or the Thieves’ Forest instead, but when I came up with the animation idea I decided that this one was definitely the coolest to animate.

What do you guys think?