Jump and Splash

**Constructive comments and are greatly appreciated**

For this final version, I added 3 splash frames at the end because I watched many dolphin jumping videos on YouTube and after a dolphin jumps there are a series of splashes even after the dolphin vanishes under the water. I also made a frame for the whole animation. Well I hope you like this dolphin animation. I spent 4 days (including my 2 test versions) and I don't know how many hours on it. Do check out my WIP versions if you are interested: Test 1 and Test 2.

Any more edits I do to this animation will be minor, such as adjusting speed on frames, and maybe redoing the Preview animation so it says Jump and Splash instead of Preview. OK I changed the Preview animation. Goodness, this animation seems even darker after I added the frame, perhaps it is the drop shadow (though really Cutout) on the frame that darkens the whole thing. I may need to fiddle with this but it will be a while before I do since it would require considerable amount of time and my creative inspiration is drained on this piece right now. What do you think? Is this animation a tad dark or does it make it seem more like a sunset night scene? Comments welcomed.

I am disappointed in the dithering or pixelation showing in this animated gif, it was not there in my frames and only showed up after saving the frames as a gif. If you look along the horizon on the right, on the dolphin images, and on the light areas of the frame you can see what I mean by dithering. The dithering does not show on my test animations either so I am wondering if the increased file size due to the large frame and the addition of 3 splash animation frames contributed to this occurring. I tried various optimization settings as well. If anyone has any suggestions on how to keep this from occurring, I would love to hear. I use Animation Shop to animate.

Now the big question is, who wants to help me sort through the folder on my desktop I used for this animation (215 MB; 58 files)? I save layers as I work in Corel Paint Shop Pro in stages in case I need to go back to make changes which I often do. Then I merge some layers and save that. And a final merge and saved in PSP format so I can animate the layers (frames) in Animation Shop. A lot of this will eventually get deleted as I only want to keep one complete set of each phase. The final image may only be 11 frames but each frame had a few layers when in Corel Paint Shop Pro. I will have to count them at some point.

A very special thank you for the stock providers of the stock I used to create this dolphin animation.

for the playful dolphins: [link] [link] [link] [link]

for the lovely sunset photo [link]

for the pretty quartz texture, [link] , I used on the frame. Once I made frame darker using blending modes, the colors of this texture echo the colors of the sunset photo nicely.

And now for the list of the splash/water brushes and images I used to create the splashes.
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1. [link]
2. [link] and her other website, Obsidian Dawn [link]
3. [link]
4. [link]
5. (downloaded years ago, but it is no longer available for download)
6. [link]
7. [link]