Keyboard
This animation was created in early 1996, when animated GIF's first became available. It began as a photograph. I used a macro lens extension (or two) on a Mamiya Sekor SLR to get a close up of my DEC 386 laptop (circa 1989). I then developed and printed the black and white shot in the darkroom. At that point, the A-S-D-F letters didn't seem my style, so I scanned the photo into Photoshop 3 on a Pentium 75 with 8M RAM, changed the letters to something more appropriate, and added a little color.
Then I thought, Hmmm... animated GIF. So I went back to the keyboard, so to speak. I got my SLR, the macro extensions, and my roomate's finger, and reshot some more black and white frames; each with one of the keys depressed by the finger. I then developed and printed each photo in the darkroom, scanned 'em into Photoshop and put each finger on it's own layer. I did some finagling to get each layer to line up properly; masking, distortions, and such. Then I exported each frame individually and brought them into the good old GIF Construction set where I finally created the animated GIF.
This animation was featured on my 2nd generation web site design back in 1996 (accompanying Netscape 2.0). It and it's original source files were lost to the tragic zip disk click of death plague. However, this animation was later found looming on the AMC web server which displayed it (along with some of my other images) at one time.