Animating Dead Girl From The Ring Movie (Exclusive Tutorial)

In the previous tutorial, I described creating a TV set to animate it later with a frame from "The Ring". Here I'll describe the process of the animation itself.

To use this tutorial, you don't necessarily have to complete the previous one. You can draw a makeshift TV set like the one below right now. The animation technique will stay the same.

Well, start from opening the image of the TV in the Image Ready.

If you are working with a .PSD from the previous tutorial, select the layer with the TV screen. In case you are working with a newly drawn TV or with a .jpg version of the TV created in the previous tutorial, select the screen area using the Magic Wand tool and duplicate selected into a new layer. The later actions will be the same.

Now we need a more or less horrifying picture that will appear and disappear at intervals.

I selected this nice young lady :)

Using the Free Transform tool set the size to a bit larger than the monitor and desaturate it. After that, drag the layer with the girl onto the document containing the TV and place it over the TV screen layer.

To achieve convincing animation, we'll need to create about 14 new layers with the girl and some noise. To do this, duplicate the layer with the girl and add noise with the following settings:

You'll have to select Monochromatic; the distribution type doesn't really matter here.

Keep creating new layers and adding the noise to them, each time increasing the noise by 10-20%. Keep adding layers until you have about 14 of them.

Now you have to make the girl appear only on the surface of the screen and not beyond its edges. To achieve this, create Clipping Mask on each layer with a girl, starting from the bottom one.

You should get the following list of layers:

Click to enlarge

The TV should look this way:

Now all is set to start animating. I imagined the animation as a set of following stages: a clear picture appears on the screen; then the signal should start distorting followed by a short clearance, then distortion, with a total disappearing of the image in the end.

Open the Animation panel. Create multiple frames. I created 26 of them. Just remember, the more frames you create, the larger the file will be, though it will look better.

All you need to do is make the layers with the girl invisible on each of the frames, but one that will be displayed. To do this, you need to click the eye next to the layers you want to delete.

On the first frame, only the layer containing the girl without any distortions should remain visible. The second layer should include some noise over it, the third one even more so and so on up until the sixth frame. Starting from the sixth up to the ninth, you should evenly reduce the distortions on the visible layers. The tenth frame should bring back the distortions from the 6 th one. After that, gradually increase the noise up to the full absence of the signal. The last 2-3 layers should be used for the fully distorted image. (If this explanation is not really sufficient, you may download the psd file and examine the architecture of the layers. There are some deviations from the above description, but they should not prevent you from understanding the overall scheme.)

It's almost completely done. The thing left to do is set the time of frame changes. Set one second for the first frame and 0.07 seconds for the rest. To do this, simply click on the second layer, and holding down the Shift button, click on the last one. After that, set the time on one of the frames and it will be applied to all the selected ones.

Everything's ready and you should get something looking like this:

Keep experimenting and I'm sure you'll succeed in creating something even more impressive. Good luck!