Fun_IfOnlyYouCouldSee

I made a GIF, like those emoriffic opening/ending themes from my childhood animus. The song I was thinking of for this was Jimmy Eat World's "Drugs or Me (Styrofoam Remix)," which is just emo enough to feel accurate to the mood, and just techno-y enough to feel animutastic.

It's supposed to look like an ending theme credits screen at first glance, but upon closer inspection, it's mainly nonsense on the cusp of meaning, to feel like those wacked-out dictionary vomits you see sometimes in JP stuff. They think English looks cool the same way we think kanji look cool, so like us, they just plop rando text wherever.

I was transferring over some art to prep for Tokyo Comic-Con, when I came across this Shinjuku study sketch (which I just found out is near where I always used to play FNM!) and thought it'd look cool animating the lights. Then I came across this figure and thought it would be neat if I foregrounded her and made it all look like an ending theme.

This took 34 frames with the PS animation tool, each of which I made by arranging the elements and CTRL+Shift+ALT+E merging all visible layers per "cel." I started by wiggling the background hand-camera style, as I wanted that to be the main focus, and used that as my animation base. I then recreated each of those frames with the added "dressing" elements on top--traffic lights, credits, and figure work--and merged those into my then invisibled base frames. A little tedious and more ball-jugglingly than technically difficult, but still a satisfying experience.

This left layer panel above shows some of what's in the right panel's "cels" group, including notes on when to cue certain effects as I went on my second pass incorporating the dress elements. Again, it was a lot of juggling to keep track of, but nothing actually difficult. Not pictured, but I also used the color-coding option on the layers to tell me when to change the lights. All these little notes were essential to keeping it mainly a matter of tedium than difficulty. Limited animation like this makes me feel excited to try something a little more complex, which just means more juggling, but once you have the elements you want to use and knowledge of the effect you want to create, it's just lots of clicking and arrow-button pushing.

Not normal,

Reuxben