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step one: create your base gif

as always before you can start any gifset, you need to pick what scenes you want. i often pick several different moments and experiment with what works best, some scenes will just perfectly meld together while others will be trickier.

you want to firstly select a ‘base gif’, this is the gif that you’re going to layer your other scenes onto. it’s helpful to have a gif where you can identify a darker area where scenes might be able to be blended onto. silhouettes, side-profiles and shouts where you can see a portion of the body are an ideal place to start, but you can use any scene where there is a darker area in contrast to the rest. 

for example, i picked this shot as my ‘base’:

in this shot, there are darker areas which standout, her body particularly below the shoulders but also in her hair. this provides a great ‘base’ for holding other scenes.

i’m going to colour my base gif in the way i usually would (i'm not going to go into details here, but if you want to know how i colour my gifs i have a tutorial here) but making an effort to ensure the blacks are thoroughly darkened (you can do this by adding a selective colours > black layer) and i’m done with my base gif:

step two: create your overlaying gif

next, you want to create your overlaying gif. personally i try to avoid using very light scenes as these can take a lot more work to blend in. if this is your first time blending i’d definitely recommend using a scene with a neutral backdrop, or even more ideally a dark backdrop, as this will just more seamlessly work with your base gif.

so, i’ve picked my first overlay scene as the mountain pathway, this will add a bit of texture to my gif and is fairly ‘neutral’ so should blend in well. i’m going to size and colour this as a separate gif with the same purple tones, then create a new folder (see red circle in screenshot) and drag my entire gif into it:

then i’m going to add a vector mask, to do this make sure you’ve selected the group and press this button highlighted in the screenshot:

step three: blending your gifs

now you’re ready to blend! from here, you want to just drag and drop your overlaying gif folder on top of the base gif, then set your overlaying gif folder to ‘screen’ or ‘lighten’ (i usually use screen, but sometimes lighten depending on the scenes - see what looks best!). it now looks like this:

the obvious issue here is that the overlay has taken over her face. so, we’re going to select that vector mask we added to the ‘overlaying gif’ folder, grab a black paint brush, and just brush over her face. this will remove the overlay from that area. 

i use quite a large soft brush for this (around 200px), the larger you use the ‘smoother’ the transition you’ll get. the smaller the brush the harsher your transition will be. this is the part that takes practice, but the beauty of using a vector mask is that you can grab the eraser tool and erase any of the paint strokes you’ve just done to bring the overlay back. by the end my canvas and layer mask look like this:

from this we can see i’ve blocked out the overlay from the ‘top’ of the gif and concentrated it so it just spreads over her shoulders. this captures the overlay in the space i outlined on the base gif as my ‘blending space’ earlier. i’ve also blacked out the overlay on the right hand side as i want to put another gif in this space. at this point the gif is looking like this:

i think my ‘top tip’ with blending is to leave little details to make the transition between the two gifs more natural. for example, you can see there are still patches of the mountain moving up her neck. i could black these out so the mountain scene is just confined to her body, but in leaving it there is creates more of a transition. these little background details of the scene you’re overlaying can really add to the overall texture of your base gif, and for that reason don’t get too hung up on the ‘details’ of making sure your gif is limited to an exact space. 

optional step four: adding more overlay gifs

for this gif i also added the dragon on the right hand side. you don’t have to be limited to overlaying two scenes and in fact, sometimes a nice idea is to use a more ‘landscape’ shot to add texture to your blended gif. to add more, i repeated step two to colour the shot i wanted, dragged this in its own folder on top of all my other blended gifs and set it to screen again:

i repeated the same steps in step three to black out the background, particularly concentrating in removing the line that we can see where the shot finishes. because in this shot the dragon’s head is actually partially cut off by the top, i was very careful with positioning this overlay and used a smaller black brush above the head. this positioning allowed it to look as if the overlay was giving way to yennefer’s face, rather than the shot cutting it off:

and that’s it, i’m done with my gif! this was a nice straightforward blend, but some scenes may not work as easily, which is where we turn to...

step five: using a black paint layer to create overlay space

sometimes your gif doesn’t have an easily blend-able space. maybe the character is wearing something patterned, or the area just isn’t dark enough. for example in this gif, i’ve done all the above sets but the overlay scene doesn’t stand out very well because the armour pattern gets in the way:

but we can fix this quite simply with our black paintbrush. i go back to my ‘base’ gif and under all the colouring create a new layer and with a large soft paintbrush, paint over the armour. i then set this layer to ‘soft light’. then i create another new layer and using a more medium-sized paintbrush, paint exactly behind where the figures are moving. this layer adds black behind the figures so they stand out more clearly, while the soft light layer aids the transition as it darkens the whole area. now we have this:

this has made the overlay a lot more visible. you can use this technique to pretty much darken any layer. i always try and darken the section i want using ‘soft light’ layers as this creates a smoother transition than you’d achieve by just jumping in with your normal black paintbrush layer, but remember you can use multiple layers to reach the effect you want.

this can be taken to the next step to literally blacken out one side of a gif (and it may be useful if you want to do more side-by-side blending scenes), starting with your normal base gif coloured (admittedly mess-ily):

to completely darkening the right-hand side of it using a few black paintbrushed soft light layers:

and overlaying another gif into this darkened patch:

i’ve even used this technique for light scenes with success, it just might take a bit more practice and you’re better off starting with scenes that naturally have a darker background if you are a blending beginner.

the end!