Ok life has been busy again .. The tutorial I promised

How to Create a live-action Animated Digital Scrap Page by Cherie Shields Have you seen those cool animated pages and thought how did they do that? Now you can try one for yourself! Just follow this outline to give you the basic idea of a great live action animated layout. This makes the photo appear to move through a series of actions, like blowing bubbles. This layout contains the animated action within a frame. You will need: A series of action photos. Digital Scrapbooking software that supports layers. A basic understanding of your chosen software for resizing/cropping/opacity. Animation software (I use Ulead gif animator 5 because that is what I know) Digital scrapbooking supplies to make your layout including at least one frame. I used my kits - Boys 2 Men, Boys 2 Men Extras and Simply Frame Me. I will be explaining some of this using photoshop CS2, but it doesn’t take much to adapt the concepts to other software packages. A great live-action animated layout starts with some preparation …. You will need to take a series of action photos in reasonably quick succession (stick to a few to make this easy to begin with) You will notice that in each photo I have common elements or landmarks that will help you align the different layers later. (The light post to the left of frame, the subject’s head and verandah rail are points of reference for alignment) If you are going to edit your photos (if they are a bit too dark/light etc) do this first and make sure they are all edited using the same settings or you will end up with a mishmash of mismatched colour. Next, create your layout as you normally would, but add all of your photos in order under the frame. The first photo in the action needs to be on the bottom. You will need to resize and crop them together so you end up with a smooth animation. If you decide to tip your frame like mine, leave this until last. Change the opacity down on each photo layer above the first photo of the action, one at a time and move the photos so you line up the landmarks I spoke of earlier. You will notice they will be blurry at first. When you have them aligned properly, you will notice that the blurriness between each layer will disappear or be lessened considerably. When you have done this, change the opacity back up to 100%. Crop the photos back so they fit neatly in the frame. If you want to angle your frame like mine, just simply choose all the layers together (photos and frame) move and rotate as you would normally do in your chosen software. SAVE your layered version now. Next you need to save a version of the layout for each photo. To do this just hide the photo layers you don’t wish to use and save as a .jpg as you normally would. This way each animation frame is aligned perfectly because none of the other pieces move. Give them numbers in the saved file name so you can easily keep them in the right order. If you need to post this on the web, its best to save sized down versions with as low a filesize as you can manage without too much quality loss. I sized mine down to 500x500 pixels and chose “Save for web”. This may be a done differently in your software. Next I open up my animation software. I like to use Ulead gif animator because it has an easy-to-follow animation wizard that steps you through the process. This is very similar to making a blinkie. You need to make your size the same as your layout. Select the layout pages in order from the start of the action. With the delay time, the bigger the number, the slower the layout frames will cycle. If your animation moves too fast, it will be hard to watch. The demo (red numbers) will give you an idea of how fast you need to go. You can edit the frames later if necessary. Hit next and your animation will be created. You can then click on preview to see your animation in action. If you are happy then save as a .gif file. The only things that will be moving on your layout are your photos, so it will make it look like an animated photo frame. GALLERY POSTING: Not all galleries allow animations to be posted (or your filesize may be too big if you choose to keep a higher quality) but you can host on a site like www.photobucket.com and post an animated version in the layout description using the [img] code. Just post a static image of one of your layouts and put “animated” in the title. Once you get the basic idea down-pat, you will be able to take it to the next level and create movement and reaction with your elements like you may have seen in animated layouts around the internet. Alternatively, you could also choose to make a slideshow of photos from the event that the layout is about instead of a live-action like this tutorial. I hope you found this tutorial useful and I would LOVE to see your layouts. © Cherie Shields 2007 All Rights Reserved