Dylan Sprayberry attends the series premiere party for 'The Shannara Chronicles' on MTV at iPic Theaters on December 4, 2015 in Los Angeles, California.
how do you merge gifs together like you did with your latest teen wolf one? it's supberb and i haven't seen anything like it before!
thank you! i’ve had a couple of people ask so i decided to put together a little tutorial under the cut because i think that’ll explain it better. hope it helps you! i’ll be showing you how to make this gif from this set:
so to start off with you want to make normal gifs of the scenes you want to ‘merge’ together (you’ll need two minimum) and just go about making the gifs as you usually would! for this gif, i simply made three gifs of each of those separate moments - the key thing is you have to make sure they all come to exactly the same number of frames at the same speed.
make sure all your gifs are on animation timeline because it just makes it easier when overlapping them (otherwise you have to manage it frame by frame which is tedious)! then just drag one gif on top of the other, position it where you would like it, and set it to ‘screen’. so now your gif looks like this:
yay you’ve got the overlapping down!! but i’m not happy with that, i want to tidy it up a bit. so, i put a layer mask over the top gif, grabbed my good old black paint tool, and simply painted over the bits i didn’t want the gif to overlap - this effectively limits lydia’s face to just lydia’s silhouette!
i also want lydia’s face to stand out a bit more, and sometimes you’ll find that if your ‘background’ gif isn’t darker in the place you want it to merge in the overlapping gif doesn’t stand out. so, i simply created a new layer between the two gifs, grab my black paint brush again, and paint the area behind the ‘overlapping’ gif. this will make it stand out, so it looks like this:
i know it doesn’t seem like a massive difference, but when your background gif is lighter this little trick can be a life saver.
so i then repeated the entire process with the parrish side of the gif. again, dragging this gif on top of all the others, and using layer mask to erase any part of the gif i didn’t want to see.
that’s the overlapping bit done! now you just colour it how you’d like (sometimes you’ll want to make a couple of adjustments to the layer mask, but it’s all about playing around with what you think looks best). and here’s the final product:
i discovered that with this gif, lydia’s face looked too blue when put under the same colouring as the others; so i just created a new colour balance layer within my psd and used a layer mask just how i did when i was overlapping the gifs to make it look better. of course it is possible to colour your overlapping gifs separately before merging them, but personally i prefer to do it this way as i find it more cohesive with the final product. ultimately, it’s up to you! play around and do what you think looks best.
my tips when trying this is to just be patient and play around. unfortunately, it doesn’t always work; for example merging a light scene with a dark scene is difficult as you can end up losing the darker scene. you’ve just got to play around a bit with the layer marks, they really help pull the gif together. i used this technique for the entire gifset, although obviously the finished product for each one is a little different! using silhouettes is a nice way to start out and find your feet as they come together fairly nicely, but you can also merge two scenes top and bottom like i did here:
this is done exactly same way; just use a larger brush when you’re doing the layer mask to make it blend together more!
good luck! i hope this actually makes sense and is of use. if you have any questions feel free to shoot them at me; i’m not the best at explaining things but i will try my best :)
