I wanted to learn some basic animations and create a fun website for my home server since I had already set up my NAS, a Minecraft server with a 3D map, and a nginx reverse proxy. I did some research, clicked through some demos, and eventually stumbled across GSAP as a simple library to learn basic animations.

As I was scrolling through the demos of the library on CodePen, I stumbled across How to Animate a Coffee Drinking Sprite With ScrollTrigger and immediately thought that a simple, stop-motion style animation would be a great fit for my personal site.

To create the animation, I recorded a slow motion video of myself waving in my room using my Pixel 7 and Open Camera. I used a phone mount attached to an old chair and a light therapy lamp that I own to take the video in my room as seen in the following photo. I uploaded this video to my NAS and used VLC media player to take captures every few frames for the animation. I ended up with 40 captures that I stiched together using ImageMagick, a command line tool for image processing.