Monday, June 25, 2012

How To Make Animated GIFs: a Brief Tutorial

Dudes and dudettes of internetville,

In my spare time, I'm making a lot of looping gifs these days.  I've been hearing from lots of folks who want to know how I'm making these little moving images.  Making them has been so much fun, so I figured I'd try and share a little of what I know.  Keep in mind that this is, of course, just ONE WAY of making animated gifs, so it's hardly authoritative or exhaustive.  Mostly it's just a working method that I've discovered--and it's bound to change over time.  I'll update again when I figure out some new things.  "Like" my page on Facebook to check out when I'm putting stuff like this up.  Also, feel free to drop a line and ask questions about whatever.


Until then, on to the show!
In-process line drawing of Usopp-kun

 














31 comments:

Morgan Rhys Gibbons said...

Oshiete kurete, domo!
Chou arigatai zo!

chaz said...

Thanks, really detailed! You're animation is great. I used another tutorial you did a while back to create a couple of gifs from animation I've done. Not as cool but certainly fun to do.

http://chazamation.com/2011/09/29/gauntlet-gets-gifs/

http://chazamation.com/2012/04/28/capetastic/

Thanks for sharing your precious secrets!

Brittany McCarthy said...

Great tutorial, thanks so much for posting! Now I wanna try making my own!! :D

Frankie Swan said...

THANK U SIR!!!!

Unknown said...

THANK YOU SO MUCH! Am trying this out right now

Alê Martins said...

Thanks for sharing Anthony!!! Amazing work! >.<

Lord Pancreas said...

Great tutorial, but for image sequences you want to use PNG, not JPG. PNG is lossless and compresses cartoons very well. JPG is lossy and is x]better-suited for photos.

Domee said...

Wowowow~ love your blog so much! :D Thanks for this awesome tutorial! I've always wondered how to make them drawings move :T

Anthony Holden said...

Thanks for your kind words everyone!

Lord Pancreas, thanks for the tip on the PNG--I'm all over that next time I make a GIF!!!

Victor Maury said...

Oh wow, thanks a bunch! I've been wanting to make one like this ever since I saw yours :>

L Rossi said...

Agreed on the PNGs n.n
Also, when you go into Photoshop it's easier to create your document and then, Layer > Video Layer > New Video Layer From File.
Your images will be in one Video Layer (as opposed to loads of individual frames), and you won't have to line the images up. You can convert the layer back to individual layers if you want in the Animation Window settings > Flatten Frames into Layers.
Look forward to the next GIF!

Ramya said...

I're really been looking for a nice tutorial like this! :) Thank you!
Also, another thing that I am trying out, is to use the Animation Timeline in Photoshop. ( I notice you are using Frame Animation) which I have no clue how to use,(sorry!) but the timeline animation works really well too.( its on the Extended Version of PS)
And if you don't want to colour in Flash (me!) then you can export the animation from there as a JPG/PNG sequence, and take into Photoshop.
When you import any sequence it automatically asks you what frame rate you want it to be, and you can always edit this in the document settings within the animation palette. Put a new blank video layer on top of this and you can paint frames on a timeline just like Flash.It has onion skinning as well.
Sorry if this is information that is already available (probably) but just how I was trying it out. :)

Bostontranslation said...

You are a sage, a gentleman and a scholar and a cowboy and an alien...

Jeff Maka Merghart said...

oh my gahd... now I'll never get my anims done :P I'll be making gifs all day!! Great tips and, as usual, great art! Your stuff is terrific!

neresta said...

Thank you! Useful thing! )

Jaison said...

Thank you for this detailed tutorial. I was really useful.You could have shown the animated pic also. Blogspot blogs does not support gif directly.I upload gif animations to photobucket and add the url to my blogger blog, then it worked.

Rob said...

very kind of you! gotta give it a try now i guess :D

Dangermanumber6 said...

The JASC Paint Shop Pro 9 comes with a fairly decent gif animator and I'm pretty sure version 9 is freeware because after 9 it was bought by Corel & JASC released it for free. You can do morph animations with it too. I've never had photoshop and am not sure what flash program the author's using, but I alays made them with the animator bundled with 9. It's 8 years old(2004) but it still works on win7 on down and it's fairly easy.

Dangermanumber6 said...

https://twimg0-a.akamaihd.net/profile_images/1786050012/1404729088_m_reasonably_small.gif
This is my twitter avatar made with animation shop 3 that comes bundled with paint shop 9. I compressed it as much as possible to load quickly so it's a bit grainy.

matt said...

dude u are awesome.. going to go through this later... and your blog too

Lately i have been loving hand drawn gifs and loops and the sprites from old school (and new) japanese video games

jayaram said...

Thats Awesome!

now I really wanna make my own gif's!

need to learn the basics first

TABIA LEES said...

I love you so much it hurts sometimes.

ddddddd said...

thank you sir for this tut! you are so kind! i'm a newbie of sorts and i want to try this in the near future! yay for one piece ;)

Adam Tamte Volker said...

awesome! I can't wait to get my hands dirty trying this stuff out.

chaz said...

Hey Anthony, using your process again, I finished another gif. It's on my homepage. Thanks for empowering us with you knowledge! http://chazamation.com/

Sugumarje said...

Good one... Ha ha ha Stay with Your Job :D...

Sase Antic said...

Thanks a lot for sharing this tutorial on making animated GIFs!

sami said...

great information.I would like to see more posts like this.thanks

Nakkurus said...

Nice.I will try :)

web video production said...

Your post have the information that is helpful and informative. great tips . I would like you to keep up the good work.thanks

bean said...

This is a little bit late (sorry) but one way to get around the tricky/messy Flash exporting nonsense is to use a program called Swivel (from Newgrounds!) to give you nicer video files from your .swf files, since you can customize every setting before converting to a video (even add an alpha channel so you can have a transparent background) then import them as usual into Photoshop!

The Illustrious and Illustrative Sketch Adventure Lifestyle of Anthony Holden. Cartoons, Sketches, Character Designs, Storyboards, Comics, Illustration, Animation, Silly thoughts, Intermittent Posting, and Arbitrary Capitalization by American animation artist, Anthony Holden. Thanks for stopping by and taking a look!
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