Animated .Gifs

Here is a small collection of animated gifts I made over the last couple of months.

I'm very much into classical animation, so I use a lot of its techniques in my own personal work.
I also use a lot of squash and stretch in each animation, it really helps with exaggerating the movement of the characters, in a way only animation can. I also used smears, which are frames in the animation where the character is stretched, drawn or 'smeared' across the stage in a way that creates the illusion of multiple frames passing at one time. This is a really great way for me to convey the most movement in the shortest amount of frames, this method also helps keep file sizes down (as well as my workload!). You can see examples of smears of varying degrees in each of the gifs below.

I also try and explore areas I haven't tried before or not tried enough, in this gif I tried animating a splash effect and also a full rotate of the character while in the air performing other movements, safe to say the rotating part was the toughest part of this gif. Overall I am happy with how it turned out.

This one was a real pain to get right, the execution was fine, but just planning how it would work really tested  me. He is falling through portals using the gun on the left from the game Portal, by Valve. It was tricky to line up both falling animations to sync in a near perfect loop. This particular animation has received much praise in online communities, although I feel adding some more frames would help make it a lot smoother, I can at least take solace in knowing that this animation has been called "Probably the best portal .gif I've ever seen".

This animation was all about timing, each foot step is exactly 0.5 of a second, making a full cycle of the legs to be 1 second, same with the head and hair bouncing. The idea with this one was to create an animated .gif that would go in sync with any song with a beat greater than one beat per second.

This animation was to test perspective. A lot of my animation are the traditional side on view, with this one I wanted to have a character moving towards and away from the viewer to give a better sense of 3d space. I was particularly happy with this one, the speed, the timing and the angle work out really well and also received a lot of positive response from other people.

This one was the hardest, I had to make the character stumble, loose balance, while turning, and moving his arms in a circular motion. I'm really proud of this one as it was a real pain to get right, there are still some things wrong with it but I'm happy to leave it as it is.