Another animation assignment — this time, movie posters. I was (and am still) pretty psyched about how the comic cover came out, so I was eager to see if I could push my newly found animation skills any further.

I am still endlessly impressed by Kerry Callen’s animated comics; I love the sense of fluidity in them, especially the first one with the water.   So with nothing more than a vague sense of making a less choppy GIF, I went googling around for movie posters.  I felt the smoke in this one would be perfect for experimenting with fluidity.

This was done in GIMP.  Much like the last one, I started by cutting out the entire cloud of smoke, the waves at the bottom, and each piece of the face.  I put each of these on their own layer in that order.  Then I went back to the original image and fixed the cut out spaces with the clone tool. After that, I made a ton of copies of both the smoke layer and the waves layer (this is about 40 layers total, so seriously, a ton of copies).  With those copies, I used the eraser tool set at varying opacity levels to erase pieces of each layer.  With the smoke, for instance, I erased  nearly all of it for the first smoke layer, then with each following layer I erased a little bit less. Again, this is easier to show than to describe in a mess of words, so I’ll probably do another short little screencast to show a better sense of the technique.