Wow. This one was way more difficult than it needed to be. I found out that making GIFs is actually a LOT easier in Adobe Flash. But I’m broke and stuck with GIMP, so…

Anyways, based off this design assignment, I decided to make my own, but inspired off a tv show, The Legend of Korra. Since the final season premieres tomorrow, I thought it would be perfect to make my own tribute to it. I used the following promotional image for the season:

I used the free selection tool to cut her out; this got really different around the thin parts of her hair. Then, I found this GIF online, which is from the intro to the show: (you may have to click on them if they don’t load)

Since GIFs have their own index color palette, I had to convert it to RGB so I could properly overlay my cut-out. I resized my cut-out to the dimensions of the GIF and pasted it as a layer. Once I did that, I had to go through the horrible tedium of manually merging the my cut-out with each individual frame of the GIF. All 47 of them. Unfortunately that’s the only way to do it in GIMP. For future similar projects, it’s better to stick with Flash. After this was finally done, I simply exported it as an animation, and reindexed the color. The resulting product is this:

All in all I am quite proud of it. Although I would love to move the foreground image more to the right to make the animation more visible, I am not going to remanually merge all those layers again. So while the image is not the most balanced or unified, at least I can safely say that the foreground exhibits dominance over the whole design. I am actually quite happy with how well I was able to extract Korra from the original image. Small traces are really only noticeable upon close inspection.

Difficulty: 4.5 Stars (Should be 5 in my opinion).