Glass Half Full, created by Bailey Tompkins, December 3rd 2019, WSU DTC 201, Project 3 – Web Comic

I was inspired to make a GIF after viewing Eroyn Franklin’s comic called “Long-Term Relationship”. I was interested in making a GIF because I felt that it fully utilized the concept of web viewing. GIF’s are unique because of their movement within the animation that otherwise couldn’t be viewed if not on the web. With GIF’s being limited to web viewing, I saw this as a perfect opportunity for this project. I followed a similar layout to Franklin by creating a GIF that has a start to finish that forever repeats. This allowed me to guide my viewer by making them feel like there wasn’t a rapid change between the beginning and end of the gif. I tried to ease the transition by slowly emptying the amount of juice in the glass and adding the juice back to the pitcher to create a subtle change before the gif restarted. I expect that the viewer will interact with my work by being able to view the entire GIF in one frame. I guided them to view the GIF this way by creating an orange frame around the GIF, similar to the backgrounds the Franklin uses her comic “Bikram Addict”. I found that my entire comic can be viewed without having to scroll or adjust the screen even if the reader is viewing on a desktop, laptop, or mobile device.

I believe Scott McCloud would agree that my work follows the elements of a comic. As McCloud defines a comic as images in deliberate sequence that convey information, my web comic combines the use of many pictures created from illustrator that are merged into a GIF on Photoshop to portray a pitcher of juice being poured into a glass. The deeper meaning behind this comic is to look at the glass half full rather than half empty and because the GIF is forever repeating, there will always be more juice, a metaphor for happiness, to fill your glass, a metaphor for one’s life, with. Therefore, just because the glass isn’t quite full right now, there is plenty of juice out there to fill it with.

As explained, I utilized both Illustrator and Photoshop to complete this assignment. I first made a series of jpgs from Illustrator by hand creating the figures shown on the GIF. I made the series of images by making small adjustment between each image to complete a final sequence of the glass being empty to being poured and emptied again. I then applied Photoshop by uploading the nine images created in Illustrator into Photoshop and creating a frame animation. In Photoshop I was then able to make each image its own frame and put them into chronologic order to create a time lapse animation. I then saved this as a GIF as my final web comic.

I uploaded my web comic on WordPress by using the class blog. Although the class blog has many limitations, I found that I was very satisfied with the viewing of my comic because of the frame I had previously created around the animation. Within WordPress my viewer can see the comic in one frame without having to adjust the screen or scroll therefore there was no need for me to make other accommodations for posting my comic elsewhere. I spent quite a bit of time deciding if I wanted to add a caption to the media or not, but I finally decided on adding a quote as a header to the GIF as well as a title to my overall post. I am very satisfied with my uploading experience to WordPress and found that the limitations didn’t affect me as much as I expected. I was able to upload my GIF file with no complications by simply adding it to the media and selecting “full size”.

Throughout the time of this final project, I not only significantly improved my skills within illustrator but I learned how to employ animated GIFs within Photoshop. Before this project, I never considered how GIFs are made or that it was even possible to make your own so easily, but by watching a few tutorials, I was able to utilize this feature on Photoshop that I didn’t even know existed. I really enjoyed learning how to use make my own GIF and now that I know how to do so, I will definitely be utilizing this feature in the future.

*Link To Blog Post of Final Comic