GIF Struggles

I have been struggling so much with making gifs. Even though I have made them as simple as possible, for some reason most of them haven't gone completely to plan. I would write a separate post about each process and every little thing that went wrong but it would be an essay! I don't have time to write another essay on top of my dissertation so I am going to outline some of the problems I encountered. I created most of the gifs on Photoshop. 

Firstly, on a slightly humorous note, after creating the gif for 'saudade' - longing for something that might never return. I forgot to loop the gif, so the hand actually doesn't return... . Easily fixed luckily. If this just appears to be a blank square to you, the hand has most likely been and gone already:

For both the 'schadenfreude' and 'hygge' gifs, I needed to make something rotate. Before I remembered that keyframes existed I spent 10 years taking the symbol (schadenfreude), creating a new layer, rotating it a tiny bit and repeating. I ended up with hundreds and hundreds of layers and in the end it didn't work properly. It was a jolty and slower than I wanted so I converted the frame animation to a video animation to see if I could fix it somehow. This is where I realised I could use key frames. It took me about 10 minutes to recreate the gif I spent ages on, but it works now, so that's good! When it came to doing the hygge gif I thought it would work in the same way but this happened:

Not what I wanted. I tried to fix it many ways, including making it frame by frame but it didn't work. I tackled this by attempting to use After Effects. I figured out how to rotate it on there but wasn't sure in what format to save it. Google mentioned that it needed to be put into Photoshop to create a gif so I chose the option that saved each frame as a jpg. and opened them in a stack in Photoshop. I then used the option to make frames from layers at it worked finally. Final gif will be revealed later.

Another one I found difficult was the 'gokotta' gif for the reason that I could move one of the triangles (creating the beak) in a way that didn't remove some of the shape or go up rather than across. I wanted it to pivet at a certain point but couldn't figure out which point worked best. I ended up having to take it back into Illustrator and adjust the shape to give me more to angle:

Though the gif isn't perfect, the action I was looking to achieve has been achieved in the final gif, so all good. 

Even though I didn't have time, I also experiment with different effects on some of them, below is the first gif I created for the pochemuchka symbol. This isn't the one I went with in the end but it's still fun to watch:

The easiest gif to create was actually the gigil one, which I was expecting to be the most difficult. I don't think I want to animate anything ever again. But the ones I have don't look so bad so it was worth it in the end.