Tabletop Whale's guide to making GIFs
November 3 2014
Recently I’ve been getting a lot of emails asking for a tutorial on how to make animations. So this week I put together a quick explanation for anyone who’s interested. This is just a run-through of my own personal animation workflow, so it’s not a definitive guide - there are plenty of other ways to make animations in Photoshop and other programs. I’ve never tried making a tutorial about my own work before, so sorry in advance if it’s confusing! Let me know if there’s anything I wrote that didn’t make any sense. I’ll try to fix it if I can (though I probably don’t have room to go into detail about every single Photoshop function I mention).
An animated guide to breathing
October 24 2014
As promised, this month’s infographic is packed with actual science. I decided to illustrate how different animals breathe, and I picked three species that I thought were particularly awesome. The topic really lends itself to a short looped GIF so that was an added plus. In other news, I’m getting my new computer this week! It’s going to be awesome working on something that can have more than one heavy-duty application running at once.
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Sources
- Freeman, Scott. Biological Science, 4th Edition. San Francisco: Pearson Education Inc., 2011., Harrison, Jon. Ventilatory Mechanism and Control in Grasshoppers Amer. Zool., 37:73-81 (1997), Ritchison, Gary. Avian Respiration. Course materials for Ornithology 554/754
Flight videos deconstructed
September 29 2014
This week’s post isn’t entirely scientific, but I thought I’d upload it anyway since it’s related to animals and patterns in nature. When I worked in an insect lab as an undergrad, I helped out with an experiment about mosquito larvae. As part of the process we used a Matlab program to manually input the larva’s location during thousands of video frames.
It was a fun experiment, and I wanted to make something similar from Youtube videos. I found slow-motion videos of five flying species, and mapped out specific points on the wings during one wingbeat. I ended up with 15 frames per wingbeat, and I connected every frame using imaginary curves that went through all of the 15 mapped points. Of course, 15 frames isn’t nearly enough for any kind of factual conclusion, so this week’s post is just an art exercise. But hopefully you can enjoy this as an artistic pattern based on real life.
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Sources
- Bats in Slow Motion 2 by the Cranbrook Institute of Science. Life in the Undergrowth by David Attenborough. Geese taking flight by Edward Tufte. Hummingbird in slow motion by Masateru Maeda, Chiba University. Moth feeding from a flower by the Riffell Lab, University of Washington.
