How Did You Do That? Nancy Liang Shares Her GIF-Making Process

I’m excit­ed! It’s final­ly time to share my newest fea­ture called How Did You Do That? This series will revolve around mak­ers and how they cre­ate the things we love. It comes from both a curi­ous and self­ish place, because when I look at an illus­tra­tion, I often won­der how it was made. Don’t you?  For the first install­ment of  How Did You Do That?, illus­tra­tor Nan­cy Liang shares how she cre­ates her beau­ti­ful­ly spooky GIFs. She also gives some great advice for aspir­ing animators!

So, with­out fur­ther ado, here’s my inter­view with Nancy!

Brown Paper Bag: What’s the first step of cre­at­ing your GIFs? What type of draw­ing mate­ri­als do you use, and how do get your images on the screen?

Nan­cy Liang: I begin with sketch­es first. They start rather loose­ly but become more defined as I use them as a guide when I col­lage. Some­times my final work will not look exact­ly like my sketch­es — a few things may be miss­ing or changed.

Nan­cy’s ini­tial sketch (fin­ished piece below).

NL (answered con­tin­ued): If it is an ani­mat­ed piece I have to think about what I need to ani­mate before I start. I write a lot of notes and use a check­list. For me the ani­ma­tion process must be very orga­nized and con­trolled. The process is very close to that of tra­di­tion­al ani­ma­tion. The back­ground is usu­al­ly a sta­t­ic hand­made and/or hand drawn piece and what I choose to move is sep­a­rat­ed into lay­ers and placed over the back­ground. I will then scan all my lay­ers into my com­put­er, arrange them in Pho­to­shop and then start to animate.

I use lots of kraft paper and dis­card­ed card. If I ever use col­or I make my own tex­tures by paint­ing, using mark­ers, pas­tels etc. I use a range of graphite pen­cils rang­ing from 9H to 9B.

Nan­cy’s fin­ished ani­ma­tion (sketch above).

BPB: How do you cre­ate a smooth dig­i­tal ani­ma­tion while still mak­ing it look hand drawn?

NL: I work with at least 10 frames per sec­ond. I find any­thing con­sid­er­ably less a bit choppy.

All of my ele­ments that move are com­plete­ly hand drawn or hand made frame by frame. It can be very time consuming.

The motion captured frame by frame:

NL (answer con­tin­ued): The smooth­ness of an ani­mat­ed piece depends on your obser­va­tion and atten­tion to detail.

I believe our eyes are not as great as we think they are and it is very easy to trick them. A fast move­ment of the arm may only need 2 frames. You may feel 2 frames can be chop­py, but keep in mind smooth­ness comes down to the tim­ing you set. Every­thing that ani­mates moves dif­fer­ent­ly — it nev­er moves in a per­fect rhythm unless that is your inten­tion. Know­ing about ani­ma­tion comes with exper­i­ment­ing so the more time you play around with GIFs the bet­ter you know about bal­ance, frames, tim­ing and movement.

The motion captured frame by frame:

BPB: What’s the most valu­able piece of advice you received when mak­ing an ani­mat­ed GIF?

NL: Be obser­vant. While learn­ing from ani­mat­ed films are use­ful you should look at motion and tim­ing of sub­jects in real life. You should under­stand how your sub­ject moves before ani­mat­ing it in your own way.

BPB: Why do you work in layers?

NL: Work­ing in lay­ers allows me to ani­mate indi­vid­ual sub­ject mat­ters easily.

The objects in my work have hun­dreds of lay­ers down to the shad­ow under win­dow pane. For me every­thing must be sep­a­rate. That way I can move or redraw sin­gle ele­ments frame by frame rather than cre­ate hun­dreds of fin­ished col­lages frame by frame. I draw, I cut, I paste and shift things around. It is a reit­er­a­tive process.

Here’s how the image is broken down. Layer 1:

Layer 2:

Layer 3:

BPB: Do you have any web­sites, books, or oth­er resources that’d you’d rec­om­mend for peo­ple want­i­ng to make ani­mat­ed GIFs? 

NL: My inspi­ra­tion comes from observ­ing every­thing in real life. You should have a notepad with you and be con­stant­ly look­ing at, draw­ing and not­ing down the move­ments of things. I also like to take videos of move­ment or reen­act my own (if peo­ple are the sub­ject mat­ter) so I can use them as guides back at my desk.

BPB: What’s the one thing you wish you knew before you started?

NL: I wish I was for­mal­ly trained in ani­ma­tion. I do feel my way of work­ing is rather labour inten­sive and time con­sum­ing. There are most like­ly pro­grams you can use to make the process much eas­i­er and faster. At the same time frame by frame hand drawn ani­ma­tion is a won­der­ful way to under­stand move­ment and improve your think­ing and atten­tion to detail.

Thanks, Nan­cy! To keep up with her lat­est ani­ma­tions, fol­low her GIF blog.