Assignment Week # 8 Pt. 1 Create an animate gif

For this assignment, I wanted to do something quirky, funny and narrative, so I created an animate gif with a butterfly wandering around in the air, leaving her usual favorite flowers and eventually destinate on a piece of poop instead.

I had several ideas at the beginning, such as making a line drawing with a simple narrative and pretending to do a magic trick to make myself disappear, but I ended up with the butterfly idea, as I thought it would be more fun to work with.

I have had brief experience working on stop motion animation years ago, and I remember making more than a hundred of drawings to create a short animation with a body figure moving in the still frame that only lasted for 20 seconds, so I wanted to do something different this time, to play with different views that'd create a perspective that's more dynamic in my gif.

I started out by creating three very simple drawings: the butterfly, the flowers and the poop, then cut them out, moved them around like collages.  Below is the very first gif I made, when I was still trying to figure out the direction that would make the gif work. The butterfly was literally moving instead of flying, and I did not move the camera at all the whole time. 

From there I just tried to experiment as much as I could, played with the speed and close-up shot for the stop motion, and I even tried to think of it as a movie, where different ways to handle to camera lens would dramatically change the focus and meaning to certain scenario. In the final stop motion I made, the last few motions was actually shot separately as my phone died in the middle of shooting. That's my regret for this project and I wish I had more time to do it all over.  In the end I exported the file into gif and I believe my final looks a lot more fun than the first gif I created, tho the last few seconds may not look as fluid.