I think there will always be, at least, a handful of masochists who want to struggle to make a GIF and struggle again to post it somewhere—all because they are devoted to the perfect animated loop, and because they think there is something spiritually important about contorting themselves to create it. “[Igor] Stravinsky has a quote about constraints,” Kohler told me. Then he read the whole thing aloud: “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.”
Kaitlyn Tiffany reflects on the demise of GIFs. She discusses the embarrassing nature in which particular GIFs are used on repeat. In addition to this, the MP4 format is a lot smaller.
Have you ever had students create awesome drawings and wish you could bring them to life with movement? You can. With the free site sketch.metademolab.com you can take those hand-drawn masterpieces and make them animated GIFs to be added to any project. All you need is a drawing, the sketch.metademolab.com site, and Screencastify! Check out the steps and video below to get started!
Jeremy Badiner discusses how to use sketch.metademolab.com and screenrecording to create a GIF out of a sketch.
Giphy is integrated everywhere from an iOS keyboard app to Twitter, that’s a good signal Facebook is betting big on using the service to peer inside the wider internet.
Owen Williams discusses Facebook’s latest acquisition, Giphy. As he explains, this provides another data point to mine.
What might not be obvious, however, is that each search and GIF you send with Giphy is also a “beacon” that allows the company to track how and where the image is being shared, as well as the sentiment the image expresses. Giphy wraps each of its animated GIFs in a special format that helps the image load faster, and also embeds a tiny piece of Javascript that lets the company know where the image is being loaded, as well as a tracking identifier that helps follow your browsing across the web.
The sad irony is that many of these GIFs were crowdsourced.
Do you really need that gif? If we think climate and energy think can I get my message across in text? Each gif uploaded and converted to movie? How much more energy is worth the engagement when the Arctic seacap is melting? #digped
GIPHY, in collaboration with Paisley Park and Prince’s estate, has done a truly remarkable thing. It’s created an official archive of high-quality Prince GIFs, from virtually all of his music videos. You can browse it by album and by song.
GIPHY, in collaboration with Paisley Park and Prince’s estate, has done a truly remarkable thing. It’s created an official archi
“Doctoral Research Image” by IaninSheffield https://flickr.com/photos/ianinsheffield/40631136105 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Ian Guest created an image to visualise the ‘flânerie’ on Twitter. In a second version, Ian creates a gif to show the three layers.
“Doctoral Research Image” by IaninSheffield https://flickr.com/photos/ianinsheffield/40631136105 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
One of @meteropologeny’s maps was imported into Inkscape and created as a base layer onto which other layers were added.
Tweets were dropped on top of the district blocks. Fitting them to the size and shape of the buildings was possible, but I felt they began to lose their inherent ‘tweetness,’ so left them as simple rectangles. This meant I needed to mask out the underlying buildings …
Which is where the idea for using the Twitter bird came from, although …
It was important as a flâneur not to lose the sense of cityscape, so the next stage brought that back and introduced the different districts or quartiers as ways to categorise the tweets.
As explained previously, these tweets were arranged into different quartiers …
… with the whole street plan reintroduced so one might imagine a walk around the city whilst encountering the kinds of activity seen when wandering the Twitter timeline.
The street names are formed from blog post titles, each street intersecting the quartiers which the contents of the post exemplify.
In the final stage, for simplicity, the tweets are wiped and replaced by illustrative snippets from the blog posts on adjacent streets.
I particularly like Ian’s take on interpretations associated with the various layers. I remember creating a similar thing with transparencies in a project when I was at university.
Alan, really enjoyed the recent NetNarr Hangout on GIFS, wondering whether there is a public list of resources, especially Micheal Branson Smith’s list of mobile applications?
The GIF, this little looped video, is often misunderstood as a component of modern communication.
Antony Funnell leads a discussion into the place of GIFs in modern communication. This includes contributions from:
Gretchen McCulloch – Montreal-based Internet linguist – on the role of visual information.
David McIntosh – CEO and co-founder, Tenor (formerly Riffsy) – on the possibility of a Gif keyboard
Dr Tim Highfield – Research Fellow, Digital Media Research Centre, QUT – on the curtural dimensions.
Cheney Brew – Trove Digital Communications Officer, National Library of Australia on the GIF IT UP competition
I have written about GIFs before, even created a collection of GIFs for my colleagues on leaving my old organisation. However, this podcast provides some of the background to them.
Greg McVerry
