#crappy tutorial

(full disclosure: generally speaking i only have enough of a clue about what i’m doing to know that whatever it is, it’s being done in the most difficult way possible. it’s prolly in your best interests not to listen to me and find a real graphics maker lmao. that being said, we can carry on.)

i’ll start with this one -

because it was probably the easiest.

i’m going to assume you already know how to get to this point:

you’ve got your layers into a frame animation, you’ve cropped them, sharpened them (i use smart sharpen and this script to make it faster), etc. i’d usually add colour before text but w/e.

ok so the first thing i did was go to the last frame bc that’s where she held the gun most steady, and i used the pen tool to trace a path over her and the gun like this:

the extra parts of the path you see sticking out either side of the gif, i left those there because i wasn’t sure if i wanted the text to enter from the left side or exit off the right. in the end, i chose for it to enter from the left, so when i inserted my text, i inserted it starting from here:

so with the text ready to go and hidden off to the side, i duplicated the text layer, added a space before the words, duplicated again, added a space, duplicated again, added a space, la la la, right, so by the end of it my text layers looked like this:

ok, so then i just matched each text layer onto its corresponding frame, so the final result was that it moved across the gif, following along the path. if you’re confused about anything i’ve said above (you probably are) i’ve uploaded the work in progress psd to mediafire for you to play with.

i’d like to add that since making this gif set, the tweening tool has been brought to my attention lmao, and i’m sure there’s a way of using that to make this so much easier. having not had a chance to play around with it idk how well you could use it for text following a path though? but that’s for a different tutorial.

so that’s the first gif done. onto the next -

so first of all, my memory is rlly fuzzy on how i did the scribble over the face? and i’ve deleted all my earlier psd’s for this one. i think the first thing i did was create a new layer and just do a couple of quick lines with the brush tool, and then i think i duplicated that layer, added more lines, duplicated again, etc. and then just like with the text on the last gif i matched them across the frames one by one. once again, this is probably the stupid way to do it, and this was hands down my least favourite part of making this gif set omfg i hated it so let’s move onto the text.

start by duplicating the layer you’d like the text to reflect (on my gif it didn’t rlly matter which bc her face barely moves, but i think this method would be a lot more work on a gif that moves quite a bit) and use the horizontal type mask tool (right click the text tool to find it) to type out what you want onto that layer.

once you’ve decided where you want the text to show up (mine at a slight tilt right at the center of the scribble) press shift+ctrl+i to inverse the selection to everywhere but the letters, and then hit delete. you should now have a layer similar to this:

but being that it’ll have other visible layers under it, it won’t look like that. either way, with that layer above the scribble-on-the-face layers, you’ll get the effect you see in mine. i also added a new text layer in black right on top of where the words would show up and set it to ‘soft light’ with ascending opacity so the words would have a bit more clarity, but that shouldn’t be necessary for all gifs and i actually sort of regret it? lmao anyway, next one -

right so this one is fairly simple. the most complicated it gets is in these two frames:

the twisted effect you see above is filter > distort > and then i believe it was shear? so i did that on a couple of layers as well as on the text on the first frame there. then i literally just googled 'static textures’ and put them over a few frames and set them to 'screen’. and that’s pretty much it. i’ve also uploaded this psd to mediafire bc looking at the psd probably explains it better than i can.

so finally, last one. left for last bc this is where my ability to explain things is rlly gonna fall apart and i’m hoping most people will know how to do this their own way and can happily skip my bullshit -

all that’s rlly special abt this one i think is the cropping? which not only am i struggling to remember exactly how i did, but this time i’m 100% sure there’s a better way to do. either way, i’ve binned the crop psd and caps for this one as well, so just for the sake of the example i’ll show you how i’d make this:

so i’d start with a new file with the same dimensions i’d like my gif to be (245x245 in this case) and i’d use the line tool to quickly measure the length from the bottom of where i’d like the middle slice to be, to the top of where i’d like it to be, if that makes sense?? like this:

i’d round that to 354px, and next i’d go to the frames i’d like to crop (in this case just blocks of red and black) and i use the length measured above to figure out what size to crop to: the width being the same as the measurement, so 354px, and the height a third of that, 118px.

so now that i’ve got the three identically cropped slices i drag them back onto the original file and press ctrl+t to tilt them into place like so:

and then i just drag everything into place and here we are. the only other thing i did to the gif was add text and two black lines to cover the sharp edges where the slices met. nothing special, but here’s the psd for that too.

as far as the colouring goes for the whole set, i’m fairly certain this is the one i used, but altered slightly for each gif obvs.

and that’s it rlly! worst tutorial ever! lmao i hope it wasn’t too confusing, but it prolly was, so feel free to message me if you have questions. or if any of the links in this are broken or w/e.