Okay, so today I wanted to mess around with something completely new – “lions kick off.” Sounds weird, right? It kinda is. Basically, I wanted to see if I could get a simple animation going, showing, well, a lion kicking something off. I’m no animator, so this was gonna be interesting.
First things first, I needed a lion. I’m terrible at drawing, so I grabbed a free-use vector image of a lion online. It was just a basic, static image, nothing fancy.
Next, I needed something for the lion to kick. I decided on a simple soccer ball. Again, just a basic image I found online. No need to reinvent the wheel, right?
The “Animation” Process
Now came the “fun” part. I opened up a basic image editing program – nothing fancy, just something that lets me move stuff around. I placed the lion and the ball in the image, trying to make it look like the lion was about to kick it.
- Step 1: Lion standing. Ball near its paw.
- Step 2: Slightly moved the lion’s leg and the ball, just a tiny bit.
- Step 3: Repeated step 2, like, a bunch of times. Each time, I moved the leg and the ball a little further.
It was super tedious. I basically created a bunch of separate images, each with the lion and ball in slightly different positions. Think of it like a super-low-budget flipbook. My friend told me it’s frame by frame.
After what felt like forever, I had a series of images. To actually “animate” it, I used a simple online GIF maker. I uploaded all my images, set a really fast frame rate (so it looked like actual movement), and hit “create.”
The result? A very, very janky GIF of a lion kicking a soccer ball. It’s definitely not winning any awards, but hey, it moves! It was a silly little project, but I actually learned a bit about the basics of animation. It’s all about tiny changes over time. Who knew?
Would I do it again? Maybe. It was a bit of a pain, but it was also kind of fun to see my little creation come to “life,” even if it looked super amateur. This is the record of my practice.
