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Actual GIF file......

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The online Cafe Gift Shops now offer many full color imprinted items for people planning on or have already been down the Colorado River on a Grand Canyon River Trip. This items are exclusive and cannot be found in any regional retail store. Enjoy!

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This remains one of my favorite digital assignments, an educational project for elementary school kids, explaining how the Colorado River contributed to the creation of this chasm by the process called “down cutting.” There were many forces involved in carving out this great erosional feature but my focus was on the river, which in its own way also included debris flow, spalding and erosion. There have been volcanoes, earthquakes and other forces along the way, but the river was paramount in the drama.

I had already built many strata column drawings by the time I started this project, so I was aware of the general thickness and identification color for each depositional layer, used on nearly all geological charts. I wanted my little animation to represent this truth as close as possible.

Starting in Illustrator, as I usually do, I built a three dimensional template, with invisible perspective lines, and created a block of layers that represented these geological facts. You can see my effort in Illustration 01. Each ancient “slice” was drawn on a separate layer in Illustrator, giving me full freedom of control for future manipulation. Each “slice” was assigned the traditional geological color for identification, the color being saved and added to the swatch palette. This would make it fit into the context of the whole lesson I was interpreting with all of these drawings on Grand Canyon Geology, which ended up on my web site.

I’ve made “visible” as well, in Illustration 01, the working layer where I actually planned my erosional progress for my animation. To keep my final GIF file as small as possible I decided to only erode my caricature canyon to the bottom of Redwall Limestone, even though in reality it goes much deeper. I also planned my work so that the finished file would be quite small for quick download on the internet.

Illustration 02 is a separate drawing, done as a visual experiment to see how this idea might look in 3D. It also allowed me to practice selecting and manipulating vector objects. I needed to be able to do this in order to make all of the “slides” needed to create the illusion of animation.

Illustration 03 is all anticipation. I knew that I wanted some texture and color “blocks” that would add some reality in my final drawings. In Photoshop I built these for the final sky, surface vegetation and river surface, and saved them for later.

My primary labor remained in Adobe® Illustrator. Illustrations 04 through 13 are but a few of the actual step by step images I needed for this entire story. I’ve only included the essential ones here in order to better explain my process and keep this report down to a reasonable size.

All of the images in the left column are my Illustrator work. All of the images in the right column are my Photoshop effort.

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In Illustrator I carefully selected various points and shapes and gradually made changes in each “frame” as I moved along. I SAVED each frame as an Illustrator file. This would make it available for later editing and eventual importing into Photoshop. Day by day, bit by bit, I built the entire series which includes some important concepts in river and canyon erosion.

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For example, Illustrations 10, 11 and 12 show a process called “spalding.” This is the breaking away of huge blocks of earth, which fall into the river, sometimes forming a temporary earthen dam, but eventually it is all eroded away leaving a few remnant boulders we still see today along the banks and in the river throughout the canyon.

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Each “frame’ eventually ended up in Photoshop where I made several “selections with the EYEDROPPER TOOL, created alpha channels and applied various filters, adjusted the LEVELS or installed my previously created textures using PASTE INTO commands. I discovered as I worked that the drama was enhanced by making the internal eroded portion brighter, or fresher, than the external surfaces. The eye sees the changes better when the brighter color is where the animation is occurring. You can also see where, in each case, I added a new water surface, the vegetation texture and the sky, in Photoshop. All of the Photoshop images were collected into one larger file, organized in order as LAYERS of this file and SAVED.

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The final step was to OPEN this final Photoshop file in Adobe ImageReady. Instantly, all of the layers are translated into frames for animation. I experimented with timing, duplicate frames and image size until I got the effect I wanted. Lastly I built a title frame to provide a name for the presentation and I added a copyright line. This image was installed onto my natural history web site which won five national awards for educational presentation shortly afterwards. An example of this GIF file is now also in my portfolio on my professional web site. It was very rewarding to do this. Enjoy!