Week 6.0: Reading GIFs is Fundamental

Hatched as means to send video-like content over extremely limited bandwidth of the late 1908s internet, the Animated GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) has evolved from tiny pixelated cartoonish media to something evocative as art plus virally animated memes in social media.

After last week’s deep dive into net art, we return to the high art world of… GIFs.

Believe it or not at one time this was cutting edge viral:

Like memes we studied previously, we likely do not have to explain or describe what an Animated GIF is.

Yet this familiar form that is part of the lingua of social media represents only one potential of this media. We will examine Animated GIFs more closely as a means help explain processes, speed up/slow down time, bring focus to a critical scene/character in a movie, and present beautiful art that can be something in the space between a photograph and video.

Some more background reading on Animated GIFS:

• A 25 Year History of the Animated GIF Told by GIFs (The Atlantic)
• The Long, Remarkable History of the GIF (Popular Mechanics)
• These Incredible Animated GIFs Are More Than 150 Years Old (WIRED)
• So Long Animated GIFs, Hello Cinemagraph (HuffPost)
• re/animating GIFs (Other Cinema)
• 30 Artists Proving That GIFs Are The Next Great Art Form (BuzzFeed)

Before we jump into making animated GIFs, we will spend time “reading” them, which is fundamentally important to being able to communicate with them.

The Opener

How many different forms of animation do you see in this excerpt of twohundredfiftysixcolors a 97 film made of thousands of animated GIFs (see the full version too)

Are these the types you usually see on giphy, tumblr, et al?

We can also page through The Digital Materiality of GIFs to sample a wider variety of style and creativity.

Exploring GIFs

Jaw Dropping GIF Tweet-A-Thon

Now it is your turn to find some artistic or explanatory GIFs that do more than just aim for the laughs. That means none from giphy 😉 and we love giphy.

Explore the following collections to find GIFs that make you go OMG; find at least three to tweet out to the world (with the #netnarr tag) and include, beside the link, the reason why you think it is jaw dropping.

• Cinemagraphs
  • http://cinemagraphs.com/
  • 40 Examples of stunning Cinemagraphs (Tripwire)
  • The Best Cinemagraphs of Summer 2017 (Flixel)
  • 30 stunning cinemagraphs that will blow your mind (econsultancy)
• Education / Explaining
  • Educational GIFs
  • These 20 Educational Gifs Will Teach You More Than A Textbook Can (boredpanda)
  • 25 GIFs that explain how things work (Relatively Interesting)
  • 2,000 GIFs Of Sign Language That Are Hilariously Easy To Learn (boredpanda)
• Art
  • 30 Artists Proving That GIFs Are The Next Great Art Form (BuzzFeed)
  • The GIF Elevator (Museum of the Moving Image)
  • Museum GIFS (tumblr)
  • 30 Artists Celebrate 30 Years of GIFs at an IRL Art Show (Vice)
  • Remix the Museum (Brighton Youth Film Festival)
  • Tate Collectives 1840’s GIF Party (Tate Museum)
  • GIF IT UP Competition (Digital Public Library of America)
  • Eran Mendel (artist)
  • NYC Gifathon (Slimjimstudios)
• News / Protest
  • 6 GIF Artists Hack the Language of Propaganda (Vice)
  • Seattle Weekly GIF Gallery
  • The 2018 Grammys as told by these 8 GIFs (Los Angeles Daily News)
  • 35 Amazing Sports GIFs (Ranker)
• Science
  • Cool Science GIFs
  • How GIFs are changing the way we talk science (The Conversation)
  • Science GIFs (Reddit)
  • All the NASA space gifs you never knew you needed (Popular Science)

GIF Makes

Enough talk, let’s make GIFs. For this first series of NetNarr Makes (we will do more next week), we will use the giphy GIF Maker Tool where we can easily make new GIFs from YouTube content.

While not necessary or required, you might want to create your own account on giphy site. If you do so, then you get to have your own awesome gallery of everything you created there (well I think mine is awesome).

 

Many GIFs From One [Western] Video

In our first Make, we will all use the same original video clip, a scene from a 1958 Western film (no knowledge of the original movie is required), but each person gets to choose a key scene (just a few seconds) to “gifify”. It’s interesting to see which ones people pick.

You will create two GIFs from the same scene, one with overlay text and one without. What can you suggest in a GIF without any text?

This Make is opportunity to learn how to make an animated GIF from any YouTube video using the Giphy Gifmaker. As an experiment it’s interesting to see what portion of the same clip people will isolate from the source video. Do this Make

 

This GIFfed Digital Life

For the second Make, you get to pick the source material, but you are asked to create a GIF that makes commentary or highlights the course theme of This Digital Life- -something that represents how digital technology is changing the way we interact, how we are tracked and maybe watched, how technology is mediating our lives. Again, you are to create two GIFs, one with a caption, and one without.

After you have practiced the GIF making process on a clip of a western movie you like do not care about, now you get to make a similar set using a YouTube clip you select. But the topic for this one has to make a statement or represent metaphorically the NetNarr course theme of This Digital Life. Do this Make

 

Here is Your Week 6 GIFChecklist

These tips may help you get those GIFs moving in your blog.

Week 6 Checklist

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Featured Image: Edited remix made for animated GIF based on the Reading is Fundamental program. I pretty much am doing an illegal remix in the name of teaching. The logo is not the current one used by RIF. Sorry, but it fit so well.