The holidays are upon us and 2016 is nipping at our heels. The only decision harder than what gift to get your grandmother is what GIF to attach to inter-office emails and Slack threads. We've gathered some of the most festive GIF artists on the net for a series called 12 Days of GIFmas. We'll shine a red and green spotlight on the creative process behind these shareable bites of holiday cheer.Like a guardian angel, Oakland-based artist Bill Domonkos uses animation to breathe new life into aging illustrations and photographs. His simple animated GIFs take on a steampunk aesthetic, infusing Victorian-era wardrobes and creatures with flying saucers, gravity-defying affectations, or in the case of his holiday GIF, a perpetually swinging ornament. Aside from his GIF work he also has designed a photography app, multiple games, and a small family of short films.
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We spoke to Domonkos about his creative process and the story behind his avian GIFmas GIF.
The Creators Project: Can you briefly explain the idea behind the GIF?Bill Domonkos: I found this great archive book illustration of a pigeon from A Text-Book of Human Physiology (1906). The illustration depicts a phenomena which followed the destruction of the semicircular canals of the pigeon. So the illustration is showing the peculiar pendulum-like movement of the head. The animated red ornament mimics that pendulum-like movement, and combined with the image of the pigeon provides an interesting contrast to modern holiday culture.Run me through the process of creating the piece. What tools/techniques did you use?My inspiration is usually triggered by the archive materials I find (in this case, the pigeon image) and how those materials can be transformed by adding or combining them with other elements. I find Adobe After Effects and Photoshop indispensable when combining multiple assets into a GIF. In this pretty simple GIF I used After Effects to animate the ornament and composite it with the image of the pigeon. I rendered it as a .mov file then imported it into Photoshop as an image sequence. In Photoshop you have better control over the GIF compression which allows you to make adjustments to the image quality, frame rate and file size. Once I made those adjustments I exported the final GIF with Photoshop.
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