Week 5 GIF animation : the Juggler

The assignment is "just" to create a GIF animation. I have never done that before so I had no idea of the amount of work for a given result.  I decided to do a guy juggling with 3 balls. That was clearly something too complicated for a simple assignment! First I had to find a character. I found a picture on the web.

I cut the right and the left arm and through scale and mirror I created 5 positions for both the right and the left arms. Finding a ball was no challenge, so I had my basic elements: the torso, the arms in different positions and the ball. Looking at what the movements should be, it became obvious that I had to animate independently the arms and the balls so I created 5 video layers for the arms and the 3 balls. The torso remains still. Then as I wanted to have something credible I created an Excel spreadsheet to compute the real position and speed for the 3 balls for each frame, then I created the 3 balls video layers in the time line ( painful and long process but the smooth and realistic result is there ) . Then I had to add the movements of the arms and synchronize all the parts to have a smooth animation ( also complicated because no tool is helping and there are 5 independent movements to synchronize...). I then trimmed the whole animation so that the end is also 1 frame before the beginning to allow for a forever animation. I added a gradient on the background. I wanted to add the text "circus" on the top of the image. So as I had not spent enough time on this one already, I decided to create a color neon type of effect. I added a new video layer on which I just put the text a number of time just changing the color by changing the value of hue with a regular interval. I added a drop shadow and an inner glow to the text layers to achieve the neon effect. I finished by adding a simple illustration to suggest the inside of a circus. bottom line for this barely over 2s animation: 434 layers! here it is