The document is a production reflection from a student describing the process they took to create an advertisement GIF. Some of the key steps included: 1. Designing the characters by starting with a girl and using different layers, colors, and tools to add details and shading. 2. Creating a forest background by filling it with shades of green and adding trees and shadows. 3. Adding animated elements like a question mark appearing in a footprint and flashing eyes to hint at the presence of Bigfoot. 4. Adding final touches like text, release dates, and blending all the elements together into the final GIF.

1. Production Reflection
Your Name

2. ProcessIt was always my idea that the hardest part of
creating my adver-gif would be designing the
characters. With my limited amount of skill in
Photoshop and the knowledge that using
pixels could be difficult, it was best to start off
with the characters when I still had time to
focus on details. It was very time consuming
to do, but I eventually found myself happy
with the final outcome. I started on the girl and took a couple of
minutes to find the right colour schemes.
Using the pencil tool I started on her face
and hair. This allowed me more freedom
when creating the characters and let me
be more specific. I tried to do this with
paint tool but the lines were less defined
and more blurry, so I stuck with the
pencil. Unfortunately, I had forgotten
that you couldn’t resize 1x pixel art and
had made her head to big – so I had to
re-draw her to the appropriate scale. I
found the body very difficult to design,
but it became easier once I realized
shading was key aspect to giving the
figures dimension. When using just one
colour things just blended together. I
then created new layers (which I later
merged) to turn the opacity down on
certain pixels to make her figure less
harsh looking. This made the woman
look much more visually appealing.
Having found a helpful pattern to follow
with the girl, I created a new layer and
made the boy. I used many of the same
techniques and got him done far quicker
than I thought I would. I wish I could of
made the character look more appealing
for my audience, however I feel that I didn’t
have the artistic skills needed to do this.

3. Process
Next I started to design the background.
Drawing inspiration from my style sheet I
opted to fill the background in one solid
green colour, and used different shades of
the same colour to add depth and realism
into the landscape. I adjusted the size of
my brush on multiple occasions to make
this task simpler and quicker – which
worked very effectively. I experimented
with turning down the opacity levels, but
found it looked better to use more solid
colours.
After that I added details. Such as the
tree’s and shadows. I wanted to create
the sense that the gif is set in the
middle of the woods, surrounded by
moss and shadows and tree’s that
anything can hide in. I was very please
with this outcome, because I believe
the tree’s were done in quite high
detail due to the different shading
used. I made two tree’s and then
copied their layer to make the
background look more full.

4. Process
I knew from the beginning that I didn’t ever want to draw a
detailed big foot, because it would ruin the mystery of the
book. I used the brush tool in a dark brown to draw bigfoot
hidden in the tree’s, almost blending in with the shadows I
had drawn earlier. He almost looks like an indistinguishable
brown blob and nothing at all like a sasquatch – I wish I could
of put more detail into him, but hopefully by the end when
the product is finalized and the glowing eyes are added,
people will realize what it is meant to be. I did this by
enlarging the paint brush and creating the blob to be behind
the tree’s by moving layers.
Next I opened the text tool and chose a bold font and wrote out the
title of my product, choosing the already planned out colour scheme.
The text looked blurry before exporting, which worried me at first,
however I realised this wouldn’t be how the text would look when the
gif was finalized. Also, I wish I used a text that looked more like my
other two products for branding purposes.

5. Process
The next step was to make the sasquatch footprint. I picked the
pencil tool, selected the correct shade of muddy brown and
started to draw out the shape of the footprint. After filling in the
colour and adding toe prints separately, I chose different shades
of the same brown colour and started shading in parts of the print
to make it look more realistic. Once I was happy with the final
product, I merged the layers. Now I have realised that the Bigfoot
in the background is out of proportion with the foot print, but I
could just put that down to depth perception.

6. Process
This part of the project was surprisingly less time consuming than I thought it would be. Next
was to get some moving animation into my gif. So, I created a time line and, creating a new layer,
added a dot into the frame – then, I repeated the process over and over until 16 frames were
made with the result being a fully formed question mark inside of the footprint that appears
blue pixel by blue pixel. It was very meticulous work, but the result was very successful. When
planning my idea, I never thought to include the blue question mark. I wanted sasquatch to
move between the tree’s but I ended up not being able to make the original idea work.
However, I like the brightness that the blue question mark brings to the product – it also
reminds me of ‘Blues Clues’ a little bit. Sometimes I would misplace a pixel and have to take a
step back to remove it and delete some of the frames to fix this.

7. Process
Lastly I added in some final touches. What should have been the simplest part of the
whole product (adding in yellow eyes) turned into one of the trickiest. A hidden layer
was blocking any vibrancy from the yellow colour, and it took me a very long time to
figure this out. Once I had, I added in the yellow eyes to appear at frame 12 and flash
on and off through 12 to 16, so it looked like bigfoot was watching the two characters
wander about him. I also made the book release date pop up and stay and frame 12
until the gif ends, which will allow the audience to know when the actual book
product would be released.

8. Process
Again, I assumed that creating the character would be
the most challenging task when making this product so
decided to prioritize character design. I started on the girl,
using a peach coloured paint brush at a large but
manageable size; this made it quicker to complete the
drawing of her head. I then filed in the outline of the
head, added the neck and changed some of the colouring
and opacity on different layers to add shading and make
the head look more realistic. I then chose a candy floss
pink colour and proceeded to draw the hair –
This was a little
more difficult because I could not get the hair to
look as flowy and realistic as her face did, and
had to use some different shades and many
different layers to achieve the end goal. After
this was completed, I copied each step and
made the boy character in a similar vein, except
I used different colours entirely. Making the
clothes and the figures was the hardest part of
this section, it took much longer to get
proportions right than I ever thought it would.
And using the paint tool doesn’t help with
preciseness.

9. process
Hiding the characters, I dragged an image of pine tree’s
I had found using google/images to and resized it to fit
the entire page using the ctrl+alt+ keys and held down
shift whilst doing so the image doesn’t blur. Then, I
changed the style of the image and put an ‘oil paint’
layer over the realistic style in hopes to make it look
more painted, like the characters. After seeing that this
doesn't work as successfully as expected, I started a
very meticulous process. Using the paint tool (too
match what I made the character out of) I went over
the pictures of tree’s in different shades of green until
everything in the frame was completed – then did the
same to the sky and the mountains and merged all
mentioned layers. This definitely made everything
seem more connected, and tied the painting like
themes together. If I added the characters back to the
image, it all looked like it belonged. I was glad that I
experimented with the oil paint layer as even though it
didn’t give me the desired affect – It gave me a little bit
more of texturized background t work with.

10. Process
Now, there was only a few final touches to complete before my
product was finished. Making the characters visible, I moved
them into the correct places I wanted them to be on the poster.
I found a font that matched the care-free adventure aesthetic
from 101font.com and downloaded it onto my mac (the
problem being you could only use this font if it was downloaded
onto the specific computer you were using at the time, which
was an issue because I may have wanted to use it through my
production on the many different computers I was using) to use
for the main title and the release date, which I made using
textbox’s at the top and the bottom of the screen. This fit
conventional poster aesthetic. Then, using the paint tool once
again I drew the blue question mark in-between the characters
to evoke the sense of a mystery from the audience, and used
the same font in a black colour for the slogan ‘Are you going?’
to capture the attention of the audience and make them feel
included and have the poster interacts with them. Finally, I
added hidden yellow eyes in-between the tree’s to connote the
big foot aspect and added a best sellers sticker to the front of
the poster to entice the audience to look further into the
product, wondering what the eyes could mean.

11. process
First of all I opened up a horizontal piece of A4
paper in photoshop and to make it look more like a
book cover I added a rectangle barrier (using the
ruler tool) in the centre of the page to represent the
spine. I then found a picture of grass off google
images and dragged it into photoshop, and then
layered over the photo using the oil pain tool to
make surreal and almost painted, which would
match the rest of my product. I then used the paint
tool to draw the big foot on the cover, and repeated
the same step as before by adding the oil paint over
the layer a couple of times until it had the muddy
affect I was looking for. Also, by using different
layers and different colours of brown to ad shading
to the foot, it gave it a more 3D affect – like it was
really embedded into the ground.

12. Next, I downloaded a font that I had chosen
in my style sheet from 1001 fonts.com and
used the same colours from my planning to
make the front cover look vivid and lively,
connoting the youthfulness of the
protagonists. I then wrote out the name of
my story with each word In a different text
box so I could move and modify the words
to fit inside of the foot print using the
transformation tool. This allowed me to
make the words fit inside the footprint and
look a little bent out of shape to add to the
authentic, natural setting. Creating a new
layers I repeated the same steps as before
but instead made all the words a light
brown colour and placed them behind their
matching word. Doing this I hoped to evoke
from the image that the title of the book
was carved into the mud of the foot print
by adding depth to the words. Using a
different font and a textbox wrote out the
author name and used the arch tool to
make it sit at the bottom of the foot print
and chose a white colour to make it stand
out. The authors name being smaller and at
the bottom of the tiltle font fit the
conventional standard for a book cover.

13. I then went on google images again and
found this image of a line notebook
page and dragged it onto photoshop
where I placed it where the back cover
would go. This was so I could create a
back ground that was interesting to
look at and also give homage to the fact
that logbooks will be a large part of the
story line. I then found a font on
1001.fonts that looked almost identical
to real handwriting so downloaded it
onto my mac. I then opened up a text
box and wrote out the blurb for my
story. I chose this font because it made
my product look authentic and
immersive, as it genuinely looks like
someone ahs just written on the back
cover.
Using a different more curvy font that
still looked like hand writing, I wrote
out some fake reviews and used the
colours red and green to connote the
sense that the book had been graded,
which could tie back to the books two
youthful protagonists.

14. Finally I added some finishing
touches to make it look more like
a book cover. I made the spine
the same brown colour as the
top of the note book (using the
clone tool) and used the same
fonts to display the name of the
book and the author on the spine
the same colours. This was to
create a similar theme flowing
through out the product. I also
found a ‘best seller’ sticker, a bar
code sticker and a the ‘Penguins
books’ sticker on google images
and dragged those into
photoshop, using the magic
wand to cut around the images
and make them fit perfectly onto
the page. These all made the
book look realistic by fitting
conventional book cover
standards, and made it look
professional. I also found a
drawing of bigfoot on google
images and used it to fill in the
gaps on the back cover so it
looked more complete.