How to make your own Ranfren-style "Character Data" GIF!
@frickinghamster this is for you! ☺️
somebody^^^ asked how i made my oc's ripoff ranfren-style character data gif!
i have pretty much endless time on my hands right now, so here is an extremely detailed tutorial. seriously, i am sorry it is so long. i truly do not know how to keep things concise it is a real problem i know 😢😢😢
disclaimer - i am super duper not the first person to do this, i've seen several of these 😁 but i thought i'd make a tutorial anyway to show how i did it at least.
i personally did this on procreate so keep that in mind!
CANVAS SETUP:
STEP 1 - Create a 308 x 226 canvas.
STEP 2 - Turn on animation assist! (This is procreate's animation tool.)
STEP 4 - Make a layer group for each frame. This animation will be three frames long!
REQUIRED BRUSHES - One basic pixel brush, and one basic dithering brush.
THE ACTUAL ANIMATION:
STEP 1 - Draw black line art for frame one using the basic pixel brush.
STEP 2 - ROUGHLY trace over frame 1 on frame 2. Then, repeat on frame 3 over frame 2. All the sketches should look slightly different so the animation wiggles.
COLORING:
This is the most annoying, tedious part by far. 🥲
STEP 1 - On frame 1, create a new layer underneath the line art layer. Temporarily hide the background color layer to work on a transparent base. Use the select/fill color tool to color your entire sketch in white.
(Copy and paste this into each other frame, underneath their respective line art layers, and fix any discrepancies caused by the slightly differing line art in each frame.)
STEP 2 - On frame 1, create a new layer on top of the white silhouette layer you just created, and enable the clipping mask. Here you can fill in all your flat colors. If you're having a hard time picking colors that fit the scheme, see the design notes at the bottom!
(Once done, copy and paste this layer into each other frame, above their respective white silhouette layers, and fix any discrepancies.)
STEP 3 - On frame 1, create a new layer on top of the flat colors layer, and enable the clipping mask again. Now you can shade with your dithering brush. Instead of flat shading, captainhowdie uses dithering to add shadows, and even sometimes uses it to create the illusion of lighter colors!
(Instead of copy-pasting this layer like the others, I recommend completely re-doing the dithering from scratch on each frame, just because dithering is a little more complicated to erase and fix...also, imo, dithering is the easiest, most satisfying part so it's no biggie anyway.)
STEP 4 - Change your background color to your desired "hovered gif" color. Personalized, I chose black. (See design details for more info on hovered vs non-hovered GIFs.) Save this as an animated GIF!
STEP 5 - Change your background color back to white for now. It's time to make the black stripes! Full disclosure, I am almost certain there is a more efficient way to do this, but I honestly couldn't think of one.
On frame 1, on a new layer above every other layer in the frame, you're going to want to draw 3 or 4, perfectly straight, one pixel tall, horizontal lines, each 2 pixels apart. Then, duplicate this layer, and drag the lines in the layer down directly under the original, literally doubling the lines on the page. Combine these layers and then repeat, until the entire canvas is full with lines. Surprisingly...it doesn't take that long.
STEP 6 (FINAL STEP) - Change the background color to pure red, and save the project as an animated GIF!
With this, you're basically done. However, if you still feel like something about your design doesn't seem to fit well with the scheme of captainhowdie's original/canon GIFs, consider some of these design notes!
DESIGN NOTES:
Captainhowdie really made a lot of fun decisions designing these GIFS. When I was making my character's GIF, I tried to keep it as consistent as possible with the original style! Here are some things I decided I had to keep in mind.
The original GIFs actually come in two versions which I'll be referring to as "hovered", and "non-hovered."
When you hover over them with your pointer, their colors change and they lose their stripes! So I tried making both versions.
In "hovered" versions, some characters backgrounds change from red to black, or from red to some other very very saturated color. Some characters backgrounds just stay red. Additionally, some characters' entire color scheme changes when you hover them.
In "non-hovered" versions, every single character has a red background, and black stripes over top.
One major consistency to keep in mind is that captainhowdie uses almost exclusively very high saturation colors in these GIFs, especially primary colors.
Personally, I based my character's color/design off of Luther's GIF to keep it simple!! It worked very well for my character who actually does wear blue hehe.
Here are some pictures of captainhowdie's original "hovered" and "non-hovered" designs if you want to analyze for yourself! 😎
I really hope this was helpful! And sorry again for being so verbose! 🥹