The scene featured in the animation above is from (500) Days of Summer, which is one of my favorite movies. It tells a realistic story in a hopeful way. So many movies about love either have a cliche romcom ending or a depressingly sad ending. (500) Days of Summer is “not a love story,” it is a “story about love.” It’s truthful and heartbreaking and comforting all at the same time.

I chose this scene because it’s the anchoring point of the movie. As stated in the script (pictured above), the movie opened with this scene on day 488, then went all the way back at day 1. Throughout the movie, different days are shown, highlighting snippets of Summer and Tom’s relationship, and finally day 488 rolls around again.

Summer holding Tom’s hand was a sign of comfort and reassurance. It was her unspoken apology and promise that everything would be okay.

To make this animation, I used Adobe Photoshop CS5 and this tutorial I found on Google. First, I found the video clip that I wanted to use, edited it down using Windows Live Movie Maker and saved it. I then followed the tutorial to convert the video clip into an animation and voila! A finish product. Using Photoshop to make animations is very simple. You can crop the entire animation, add text and captions, and many other things. For this assignment, I simply cropped the picture and resized it, but I look forward to making more animations in the future.