am i really a good person?

prsml asked:

You work is absolutely incredible. I love it :D How did you animate x fold? I'm an aspiring motion graphic artist and any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you :)

Thanks! :D

I’m afraid you’ll have to give me a link to the specific post, because I can’t find it from the name you gave me.

From what I can see of your blog, I’m not sure what I have to say will be super applicable, but here are some things I’ve found to be useful:

(1a) Make it loop - kind of obvious, but watching looping gifs is much more satisfying than having a jarring transition somewhere.

(1b) Make it loop ‘interestingly’: instead of going from A to B and then B to A by the same way in reverse, pick a different ‘return path’ to A.

(1c) Smooth frame transitions - this can be hard when tumblr limits you to 2MB files, which is probably one of the main reasons I haven’t learned how to add a lot of colour or texture detail to my images.

(2) Linear interpolation generally is boring, since not many things in real life go at constant velocity all the time. Try quadratic interpolation or the logistic function instead.

(3a) Specialize. My tastes don’t seem to coincide with what you’re making (nothing personal, of course) so I can’t tell if you are already doing something of the sort. For example, a broad theme of my blog is/was math-related visualizations, though I never explicitly followed this. Some more specific themes are compound motion (think sitting in a teacup ride) and fractals. Knowing a few things really well lets you answer ‘what if I add X?’ reliably and frequently.

(3b) In addition to (3a), actively try out new ideas that pop into your head. Especially if they’re somewhat ridiculous. If you are a tree, your roots should run both deep and wide.

(4) If you’re using code or an easily tunable program, parameterize everything. Say you have a dot moving in a circle. How fast is it going? What happens with more than one dot? How big is the circle? Does its size change? Does the circle’s size change? What if the circle’s an ellipse, or a square? Is the circle spinning on a different axis? You can probably make a set of 10 reasonably-different gifs just from changing the answers to all these questions, and if you do it right it’ll take much less effort this way than making each one individually. (Especially if the base image is more complicated than one moving dot.) If they look too similar I usually change something easy to change like colour scheme or orientation.

Hope this helps!

—

For anyone wondering where I’ve been: I still check tumblr irregularly, but don’t have any intention of posting more gifs in the near future. In the longer term it’s possible I will return to posting infrequently (say, a few posts per month), but I don’t want to get your hopes up just yet. So I am still alive, but perhaps not in a particularly meaningful sense to any of you :P

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.