George Wither, page 8, “Boo!”

“Boo!” animated GIF by @aforgrave, based on p8 from Geo. Wither’s Emblemes

Lots of good learning in getting this Anaglyph-a-GIF to this stage. In the end, I was pleased that it worked nicely with only two frames (made up of a bazillion layers), each frame repeated once with varied timing. The long pause for the first frame is intentional for two reasons:

To give the viewer time to appreciate the multiple layers in the image;
To lull the viewer into a state of comfort such that the movement to the second frame might generate a bit of a jump on their part.

The second repeat is intended to break the long pause and possibly get a second jump.

I found a lot of really good techniques for making 3D anaglyphs in the excellent tutorial: Photoshop – How to Make Jaw-dropping, 3D Anaglyphs from Photos on Youtube. It will be exciting to spend some time on static anaglyphs at some point in the future. However, the challenge today was to combine an animated GIF of the skeleton with the 3D cyan-magenta anaglyph. In the end, I am pleased with the results. I am also pleased that the GIF posted to Tumblr on my first attempt. Tumblr has been finicky in the past at handling animated GIFs.

Prior to attacking the full animation, I spent considerable time sorting out the layering and the techniques required to do the red and cyan layers. Here is a test GIF that I developed before tackling the skeleton.

“Depth of a Field” animated GIF by @aforgrave, based on p8 of Geo. Wither’s Emblemes

From the rapid appearance of GIFs based on this image as part of the latest GIFfight!, it is clear that this image captured the attention of a lot of folks. Mariana (@mdvfunes), John (@johnjohnston), Tom (@twoodwar), Michael (@mbransons) and Bill (@byzantiumbooks) all got in some amazing GIFs before I started, and each of them provided some inspiration to me as I attacked this version. When the question of making an anaglyph of the GIF came up, Mariana was kind enough to send me the .psd from her image to start with. In the end, I started fresh from the original image on page 8 of the full PDF once I had finished my Wither ds106 spinner GIF. In the intervening hours, Tom also created an Anaglyph-a-GIF using another Wither image. I’m looking forward to seeing more GIFs appear — I’ve got a nice selection of images already extracted from the full PDF and sitting on deck in preparation for further Wither projects.