I have never been a fan of comics. I can’t say that I have ever read a single one. There was only really one that ever piqued my interest and it was Watchmen. There was something very poignant about the bleeding smiley face on the cover. Having never read the comic or seen the movies, I don’t really know the story behind that, so I have tried to create a little bit of a back story while animating the cover.

My main questions were how did the smiley get hurt? Was it a bullet? I am inclined to think that it was a bullet. How fast did the blood flow? I would like to imagine slowly since the shrapnel is blocking the blood flow.. Now of course I do know that the smiley isn’t actually a character in the comic book, just a symbol used in the comic. This is my vision:

The cover of the comic book is just a frozen moment of time, but now with motion is any additional feelings invoked? I’m inclined to think not.

It took me quite awhile to create this gif for this assignment. I started by importing the static cover into the Photoshop (the last frame of the gif). I then set to work to remove the blood stain. It took awhile to first select the bloodstain using the Magic Wand tool. Once I did that I used the expand selection option under the selection menu to grab some of the surrounding yellow/black. Then I pasted the blood stain onto a new frame. Then in that new frame I removed the extra material around the stain using the Magic Wand tool again. After that I went back to the background layer and filled in the missing space with the yellow color. The next thing I had to do was reconstruct the eye. This was one of the hardest parts. I used the ellipse selection tool and drew a circle around the eye, after that I used the Transform Selection tool to rotate and reshape the ellipse to the exact shape of the eye. Then I filled that in with the Black color.

Now its time to animate. I set the blood stain layer to 50% opacity as to be able to use it as a guide when using the brush tool to paint the blood. I would paint a little bit and then hit Ctrl-J to duplicate the layer and then paint a little more. I did this repeatedly until the whole blood stain was repainted.

Now I opened up the timeline window and selected Convert Layers to Frames. This then imported all of the layers into frames, but now the problem is that the background is just a frame that plays in the beginning, but we want it to stay in the background the whole time. So then I switched to the video timeline editor (still in the timeline window), and then I changed the duration of the background frame to stay for the whole duration of the animation. Next I switched back to the Frame view, and setup a two frame tween between the last blood frame I drew and the final blood frame. This created the nice stylized transition. After that I exported the gif! Wow that really was four stars fun