In the wake of the animated posters that popped up on Reddit recently, I decided to make my own set from Wes Anderson movies (YES, I left off Bottle Rocket, as the internet was kind enough to remind me repeatedly). These were pretty tough to do—I ashamedly haven’t seen every Wes Anderson movie, so without having an idea of which scenes would immediately work, I hunted through HD-ish YouTube videos and had to download and trim them to go into Photoshop.

The original GIFs I was inspired by were styled like posters, and after hunting a little, I realized they weren’t styled like the original movie release. This gave me some creative freedom, since I was having a tough time trying to mimic each original poster (especially since a lot of Wes Anderson’s posters have illustrated elements), and broke away from that.

The video I had also wasn’t high resolution enough to really get in the nitty gritty and crop figures from the background without some serious jank-ness. Case in point:

 

I really thought I could make it look like he was endlessly running, and it almost worked! Very crude and wonky, but a good start for sure.Trying to cut a figure out when I can’t tell where he ends and the sky begins was tough.

I really tried to fit The Royal Tenenbaums into the original poster—the type was easy, classic Wes Anderson Futura Bold. I overlaid some texture to make it look like a worn photograph, and tweaked it to fit. One commenter pointed out she never inhales, and yeah, the more I watch the GIF while thinking about that, the harder it is to breathe.

The Moonrise Kingdom GIF was an attempt at a modified cinemagraph—it’s a little twitchy, but if you weren’t looking very hard, I don’t think you’d notice.

I hunted forever to try and find this poster to make the figures run through. These two main characters spend a lot of the movie on the run, and I wanted to hint at that in the GIF. The poster I found for this was actually in Korean, which you also might not notice if you aren’t looking hard. I wish I’d covered up the text before I published them.

For making looping video, I love the turn around/turn back motion. Or conversations, this syncs up very well, and looks pretty natural. Mr. Fox just looks like he’s repeatedly yelling behind him.

Someone pointed out that the submarine they’re inside is pictured in the background of the interview, which I didn’t realize until I was done. I’ve never seen Life Aquatic, but I want to watch it for a better in-submarine moment and fix this one.

Fun fact: I made the Imgur gallery public right before I posted it to Reddit—someone put it up right before I did, and so I was called the reposter and thief. So shocked, I had to pull back from my desk. I’d never been called a thief before, and especially not of my own work! Oh well, such is the internet I guess.