Well, I made this as a reply sometime during the SL Beta and then a few others of similar complexity with no alterations:
I didn’t try anything with any kind of adjustments until this one in spring last year in a thread about “favorite forum celebs”:
Which I followed up with this sometime a couple days later for a different(?) thread when I thought “I think I can do something more complex” though I wasn’t quite happy with the end result (I posted as a GIF originally, but I also made it with music in mind):
Then, slowly I did more. But, yeah, zero training or anything, and I still think of this more as “programmer art” because placeholder stuff is all I’ve done or very simple stuff that okay-enough to stay or where it doesn’t matter (and a little bit of pixel art, mainly for the Sega Genesis, for a few never-finished, personal projects).
At least on the composition and animation side, I definitely feel I’ve become a fair bit better (and definitely much faster at producing it, even with still mostly key-framing everything that’s not a wow-built-in animation by hand). I have 155 final GIFs made, another half dozen that I finished but didn’t post because I decided they were probably beyond the forum rules, another maybe 10-15 I started but never finished because I didn’t think they were good enough or didn’t turn out how I was planning (and I try mostly to make ones that are positive in some way, so I usually abandon ones that I feel cross into mean-spirited or toxic territory), and looks like 594 source videos I’ve made from the game. I do edit some WoW screenshots and some parts from photos I’ve taken and do create a bit of art for some of the GIFs. All total, the material adds up to ~39GB.
If you are curious, I mostly record and create stuff at 1080p (I usually downsample from 1440p), and I render out my final video at 1080p60 as well. Then, depending on how I want to frame my GIF, I either rescale it to 800x450 (16:9), 640x480 (4:3), or 512x512 (1:1). Then I use a separate tool to create a GIF that has framerate adjustment and some optimization ability (though I’ve also done palette and frame persistance optimizations myself as well). I try to shoot for a 400-pixel horizontal resolution while trying to keep to self-imposed file-size limit of 2.5MB though I’ll go up to 3.5MB if I for a specific GIF I want to keep the framerate up around 20fps. I like challenging myself to make framerate edits, palette and color count adjustments, and precision cropping and resolution adjustments to hit that magic file size number I set. It’s a bit of mini game that I play. ha.
It’s all very haphazard, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants artistry. I like to think of it like Hawkeye on M*A*S*H: meatball surgery…except applied to animation.
I’m no where near anyone with practice or talent; however, yeah, I do think my GIF’ing has improved. But I just need to be able to do well enough to spread a bit of positivity and fun around, and I’ve mostly obtained just enough ability to do that in the way I want.