How to make animated gifs of archive illustrations and images

This is part of a sub-series of practical guides to complement the other pages of this Winston Churchill Fellowship report, based on my own experience or picked up along the fringes of the project. Think of them as like those Wikipedia Stub pages. I encourage you to add your ideas, advice and resources alongside or below. If you’d like more of these, let me know!

Bringing still images to life is a great way to add some flair, humour or explanation to your posts. Giving life to images from the Royal Institution archives was a particular love of mine when I worked there, and it’s something you see a lot of in museum and heritage social media (check out the Bodleian’s excellent examples here). And the same technique is a good way to add some intrigue to still images used in social videos. This is based on a guide I wrote for an internal skill sharing session I ran for colleagues at the Royal Institution, but I’m sure they won’t mind me sharing it here for all to enjoy.

(note that I’m not talking about just making a gif from a video clip— there are plenty of guides out there for that).

The principle here is the same as this video tutorial — it’s well worth watching this, and the more detailed follow-up, which goes into a little more detail about the After Effects techniques needed. I use Photoshop and After Effects, and I’m assuming you have some basic knowledge of these, but the principles are the same in any image and video editing software, so don’t be too put off if you don’t have access.

Step 1 — cut out the objects you want to move (Photoshop)

• I use the pen tool (press P to activate it) to trace around an object that needs moving, then right click and select Make Selection. Then copy and paste the selected object into a new layer. You can also select using the magic wand or magnetic lasso — I reckon it’s worth getting used to making shapes with the pen tool, but if you’re not used to it and are in a rush, the other tools will do just fine. You usually don’t need to be that careful with your cutouts because you’ll only be adding a little bit of motion, and a bit of extra background moving with the object won’t be that noticeable.
• Repeat for all the objects that need to move until they are all on their own layer. Give each layer a descriptive name (ie ‘Meteors’ and ‘rocket’, not just Layer 1, Layer 2). A more thorough cutting out guide is here.

Step 2 — paint in the background (Photoshop)

• Duplicate the main background image (right click on the layer and hit duplicate), and go through ‘painting’ out the objects that are going to move.
• Use the clone tool (S) to copy a nearby section of background and paint over an object. If your background is a rough texture like an old document, this is nice and easy. Sharp detailed backgrounds are much harder. Hold Alt and click on an area to make it your target area, then start brushing over an object. Keep re-sampling by pressing Alt and clicking, and gradually cover each object with background imagery, until it’s all clear like this:

Step 3 — Animate!

This can be done in After Effects or any motion program. If it’s simple motion or just appearing/disappearing it can be done directly in Photoshop. If you’re a different video editing program, export each layer from your Photoshop file to separate transparent PNG files (File>Export>Layers to files), import these to your video editor and start moving them around. For After Effects, make a new project and drag the whole Photoshop file into the project.

• Double click on the composition it creates in the project list on the left.
• You should see each layer now in the bottom window. Go through each layer making it appear and disappear according to the animation you want (press the small arrow next to each layer, hit the stopwatch to add a keyframe, and change properties like position and opacity to make objects move around or fade in).
• If possible, make the final frame the same as the first frame to so the gif loops seamlessly
• When the animation is done, go to Composition>Add to Render Queue
• Render out the clip as a video.
• That’s it! You can convert that video to a gif using Photoshop or an online converter.

This makes for great gifs, but is a technique that can also come in handy with video editing. This video from Vox is packed with nice examples of using essentially the same technique to liven up still images in a video. It’s a sort of suped-up Ken Burns effect.

As with any creative process, this is just one solution. What’s your method? This might not be the most efficient or elegant technique, so please share your ideas and thoughts below.

These practical guides are a bit of an experiment. If you like it, and would like more, let me know!

This post forms part of the publication, ‘Communicating Science with Social Media’, which is the product of a 2017 Winston Churchill Fellowship. Read more about the project here, and for more about me, including examples of my own work, visit anthony-lewis.com.