Christmas wallpaper for phone

[The Teej]

So I made this yesterday. I used photoshop to develop the graphics and then used ImageReady to animate it all. All in all, about an hour really (from opening photoshop to getting it on my phone in its final form). I'm considering making a super detailed version, or at the very least adding a star at the top to this current one, but I still quite like it the way it is. The main limitation is the time I have from my last key press to my screen saver, really. I could have made the snow come down really smoothly, but the problem with this is, it wouldn't actually reach the bottom before the screen saver kicked in

Still though, I may experiment with this too.

This conceptual idea came about from some flippant comment I made in town, and it's actually kind of inspired me to do some more work on animated backgrounds. Now I know how to make animated gifs (I've known I can do it with ImageReady for a long time, but never knew how!) I'm definitely going to experiment more. Anyway, what does everyone think?

 

[Law]

Looks good, I just wish it was slightly smoother (Even if it was ever so slightly).

But isn't it a bit too early for Christmas?

 

[The Teej]

I've also made this one. There's something about it I don't like, though.

 

[Mei-o]

Awesome! You should be our November Santa Claus!



PS: Could you teach me how to do the snow animation since I've always had problems regarding snow animation?

 

[Tormendo]

that looks good

 

[The Teej]

Awesome! You should be our November Santa Claus!



PS: Could you teach me how to do the snow animation since I've always had problems regarding snow animation?

Ok, what you do is, make your snow in a layer cover up the whole layer, but make sure it doesn't go outside the layer. Once this is done, duplicate the layer and move it so it's directly above the canvas. Then, all you do is for every frame, select both layers and keep on moving them down slightly (you can either do it pixel by pixel or hold down shift to move about 10 pixels at a time, however you want to space it out frame by frame). On the last frame though, make sure the top layer isn't fully covering the whole of the canvas, otherwise you'll get this weird delay because the beginning frame and the end frame look exactly the same so it'll look like it's constantly falling down and not just looping through a bunch of frames.

Also, if you're planning to do christmas lights like I did, do a seperate group of layers for the "on" lights and another seperate group for the "off" lights. Then, make sure they're all visible at once, and when you go to "Save for Web", save the colour palette. This is extremely important as if you used a seperate colour palette for each GIF, you'll end up getting different colours then intended when you go to turn the lights on when it's all in one GIF file. I made this mistake myself, and no, I didn't see it coming at all, so I'm passing this on to you to save you time!

I'm assuming you know how to animate using ImageReady, if you don't, please watch this video:



If anybody can't view youtube, feel free to tell me here and I'll make my own tutorial.

Hope this helps!

 

[jabjab]

maybe having the snow fall at an angle or at least in a non linear way would look more natural.
2 lights on tree at once (sometimes near, sometimes far) would make it seem like its more random rather than the eye following the single light about.
Some kind of base for the tree so the snow doesn't fall past it.
all small things - what you have done is cute

Is it normal for phones to be able to use gif backgrounds or only newer ones?

 

[Rowan]

i made one also p.s. which imageready are u using i may have to "obtain" it

here it is if anyone wants the psd or graphics ill give em

 

[BiscuitBee]

i made one also p.s. which imageready are u using i may have to "obtain" it

here it is if anyone wants the psd or graphics ill give em

Hehe, that's quite the blizzard

Poor tree!

 

[Rowan]

YEAH I KINDA JUST NOTICED sorry for caps
it looked fine on photoshop

 

[The Teej]

maybe having the snow fall at an angle or at least in a non linear way would look more natural.
2 lights on tree at once (sometimes near, sometimes far) would make it seem like its more random rather than the eye following the single light about.
Some kind of base for the tree so the snow doesn't fall past it.
all small things - what you have done is cute

Is it normal for phones to be able to use gif backgrounds or only newer ones?

I dunno, mines kinda new, it's the Sony Ericsson k800i. I mean, it's not ancient but it's hardly top of the range either. Still though, I love the damn thing, it's my most favourite phone since that Nokia 3510i all those years ago.

Thanks for the constructive criticism, though. I'll definitely try to play around with this. The only reason why I don't put the christmas tree right at the bottom is that there's this weird darkened line at the top and bottom of the phone (it's built into the software, it's not a hardware flaw). On the phone, the trunk is actually pretty much at the top of the line. Thanks, though

Much appreciated.

rowanchap - It's CS2. As for your version, may I suggest turning down the snow layer's opacity a little? Also, perhaps slowing it down a little might help by adjusting the delay between frames. I've also noticed there's a very small looping glitch, although I can't really tell where.

 

[Mei-o]

Awesome! You should be our November Santa Claus!



PS: Could you teach me how to do the snow animation since I've always had problems regarding snow animation?

Ok, what you do is, make your snow in a layer cover up the whole layer, but make sure it doesn't go outside the layer. Once this is done, duplicate the layer and move it so it's directly above the canvas. Then, all you do is for every frame, select both layers and keep on moving them down slightly (you can either do it pixel by pixel or hold down shift to move about 10 pixels at a time, however you want to space it out frame by frame). On the last frame though, make sure the top layer isn't fully covering the whole of the canvas, otherwise you'll get this weird delay because the beginning frame and the end frame look exactly the same so it'll look like it's constantly falling down and not just looping through a bunch of frames.

Thank you very much! I'll try it out ASAP!

 

[strata8]

Here's mine

:

I'm going to add snowfall, but it'll take a while because I want it to be nice and smooth.

 

[The Teej]

Here's mine

:

I'm going to add snowfall, but it'll take a while because I want it to be nice and smooth.

If you have flash, it would make things 50x easier. However, I don't

I really like the look of your tree, it's awesome

 

[strata8]

Here's mine

:

I'm going to add snowfall, but it'll take a while because I want it to be nice and smooth.

If you have flash, it would make things 50x easier. However, I don't

I really like the look of your tree, it's awesome

I don't have Flash

But thanks anyway.

 

[Rowan]

i heard u could obtain flash off youtube
a free trial of course