So I thought I’d try submitting an assignment, just to see what happens. Probably not the most inventive idea – just something inspired by something else I ran into.
Apparently, street gangs in Chicago, like the Hell’s Devils, used to have calling cards (see the gallery: http://bit.ly/pyuOEl). This makes me think that poor marketing gives evil-doers a bad image. Help some of them out by creating business cards for them. But not the Joker – that’s too obvious.
At first the animation only played when I clicked on the image. I discovered it had to be inserted as full size. Maybe I’ll remember that.
This is genius, I love this comic book cover animation. AWhat’s more, I would love to know how you did it. Totally brilliant, and by the way the fact that Chicago Gangs used to have “business cards” is amazing to me, they are so bizarre. Amazing assignment, you rock!
Part of the point is to explain the process, is it not? Someone in my family had this issue of Batman back in the day, and the image stuck with me. And I’m familiar enough with Photoshop to make simple animated gifs, so I put the two together.
I used the polygonal lasso tool to select the hands and card, and copied them onto a new layer, which I then duplicated. I rotated one layer clockwise and the other counter clockwise. Animating the layers was a challenge because I’m using CS1 on my laptop and the functions aren’t where I expect them to be from working with CS5 at work. I did some googling for the how-to. After I got it working, I decided that just shaking the card was a little lame, so I used the same process to move Joker’s jaw up and down. It looks more like he’s biting than laughing, but that’s kinda creepy so it’s kinda appropriate. Then I thought about animating the laughter. Making the words move would be difficult – I’d have to do some background correction, and that would be tedious. I used the magic wand tool, with the tolerance set very high, to select the yellow, copied it onto my other layers and changed the brightness to get the flashing effect.
I think it came out okay, but I still feel like an amateur compared to the Dark Knight and Hard Boiled examples.
Love the animated comic book covers – great work.
Found a pretty wacky S.H.I.E.L.D cover at http://kerrycallen.blogspot.com/2012/01/more-animated-comic-covers.html
Definitely a great cover! You should post a comment on Kerry’s blog linking to your cover. He invites people to do so, I think he loves to see other’s take on the idea.