Moving Comics

...

or, at least, comics that move are a subject that has fascinated me recently.

The last one I did got a pretty good response, with some questions about how I did it. Well, you should know that I'm almost always making things up, so I can't be considered and authority on this (or any) subject. Anyway, I'm sure there are a bunch of ways to get to the result that I did, but I will divulge my secrets (which are so simple that, upon their divulging, you will wonder why you even asked).


First, a new comic:



and in an alternate form:

Some Dads Give Their Kids Blocks from Anthony Holden on Vimeo.

Ideally, I think it would be cool to build in a Flash functionality that allowed readers to click on a panel when they are ready to watch the animation. That way, you could get the benefit of animating moments while maintaining a more traditional feel to the comic (one that doesn't distract from the other panels because of the constant movement). I might do a little more studying to look into that option. It may involve learning some code, so buckle up.


Some Philosophy:

There are advantages and disadvantages inherent to both animation and comics. Comics, similar to novels, have the ability to delve into a world rich with sensory experience via the words and images on a page. In film, ideas can only be conveyed visually or aurally. That said, film has the advantage of time-manipulation; a director can control exactly how long you see and hear things. You can't do that with comics.

Sure, comics employ some parlor tricks: filling pages with dialogue or stacking multiple drawings that depict an action in order to slow down the reading experience. But at the end of the day, a reader gets through a comic as fast as he or she wants. The author does not control time.

By animating comics, the author can cheat a little. I can manipulate small moments of time within a panel. I think this has tremendous potential. I apologize that all I've used it for so far is to make jokes about butts and handing bricks of hash to minors.

The point is that someone with more noble tastes than me could do something really great with this. Please, noble people of the interweb, I adjure you: make great things with moving comics!


The Tricks:

I use Flash (CS3) to make the comic. I'm most familiar with this program when it comes to animating digitally, so the drawing process is pretty intuitive. When planning out individual panels, I try to make sure that things loop in increments of 24 frames, so that if I end up with panels of different loop lengths, they don't hiccup (so to speak) when the loop comes full circle.

I've tried a number of methods for actual GIF file-creation. Flash's compression engine is sort of crummy, so I tried a handful of export options in After Effects (also CS3). After Effects GIFs had similar compression issues in my experience.

Then, my good friend, Eric Armstrong, showed me the light. Here's the deal:

1. Export Quicktime (.mov) from After Effects at full quality.
2. In Photoshop, File>Import>Video to Layers. Your animation will show up in a stack of layers.
3.Cmd+Option+Shift+S ...it's a heck of a hotkey, please stretch before attempting.
4. Preview your .GIF, mess with the options, get it to where you like it.
5. Export!


Blogger has weird issues hosting gifs sometimes, so I have been using Photobucket to host the files, and then embedding image links in blog posts. I have noticed other gifs elsewhere on blogger that seem to work just fine--what are you folks doing to get yours to work?

Like I said, there are probably less convoluted ways of making GIFs, but this is what's been working for me. Let me know if you have any luck with this process, or if you have a method of your own that you use to make GIFs. I understand there are ways to make GIFs exclusively within Photoshop as well. Anyone with experience doing so, please chime in!

My thanks to you if you read this far. With any luck, I'll keep experimenting with these in the future. See you soon!