The Assignment: Animate a comic book cover.

I adore the cover art on most all of the Watchmen series, so I had to give one a shot for this assignment.  I initially started out with a different cover from the series, spent ages, didn’t come out quite right.  So I started over with a simpler one which led to this:

I’ll be putting a video tutorial up soon for this.  It is easier to explain the process by doing/showing than writing, I think, and I learned a lot about GIMP in the process, which hopefully will be useful to those who are still intimidated by it. I have never used it before about three days ago, so this is really exciting (!!!). But for now it is late, so here is a (pretty vague) outline of the process:

This was done in GIMP.  I read through this write-up by another DS106er on a similar process, which gave me a good couple of clues. Then I chose my image — I have the physical copy of the comic, so I scanned it into my computer rather than finding one online.  Then, from the original image I used GIMP’s free select tool to trace the outlines of the raindrops.  I then copied each raindrop into its own new layer.  On the original layer, I removed all of the raindrops and used the clone tool to fill in the gaps, making it look like they were never there.  The original layer is at the bottom of the layer stack; the raindrop layers are all on top of that one.  Once I settled on an order for the raindrops, I played around a bit with the amount of time given to each frame in the animation, speeding up and slowing down certain raindrops to change the overall look.