I feel like the movement in the more abstract piece adds to the feeling of being in a galaxy. The swirling motion adds to the swirl-like designs in the piece like gas and stars swirling in space. In the piece with the night sky however, I feel like the motions transforms the peaceful scene into something more ominous that has an uneasy feel to it. I think I was definitely more successful with the swirly gif, mainly because there was more freedom from the image composition. With the branches it was hard to get them to move in the way I wanted without affecting the background.

I learned the basics of creating gifs and animating images, but I feel like with more practice I could do better. It was very challenging at first with the swirls to get the spinning motion I wanted. I referenced the how-to video, but I didn’t want it to just twist and come back, I wanted it to fully rotate. Then I wasn’t sure if I should copy, paste and reverse the slides because it broke the continuous rotation, but decided on doing so because then it looked like you were floating/spiraling in word and then away again and I thought that was a bit more interesting. For the branches, I used the lasso tool to outline the branches (which again was challenging) and then transformations to make it look like the branches were shaking or blowing in the wind. I think the most fun part was having it come together and animate. Before this I would’ve never thought you could make an animation from a single picture.

I had worked on a rotoscope a year and a half ago, but I forgot most of what I did in adobe photoshop so I had to relearn all of it basically. I think this connects to my prior knowledge of art in that you have to just play around with an art piece sometimes until it just works.

This connected to my previous understanding of design thinking in that you have to achieve some sort of balance and logic/rationale for a design to feel complete. This would be a good lesson in the art classroom when inspiring students to experiment with adobe photoshop.