Long live GIFs!
My friend and podcasting partner Michael Branson Smith (MBS) proclaimed before a recent recording that “GIFs are dead.” This coming from one of the foremost artists in the field. I was not only taken aback, but deeply hurt. Some of my very best blog posts are simple GIFs from the heady days of ds106, are they now just meaningless artifacts forever looping in a vacuum during this post-GIF era? I don’t want to believe that GIFs are dead, so to counter MBS’s irresponsible claim I’m back to making GIFs. I’ll die for GIFs!
Part of the famous scene in Female Trouble when Divine asks: “Who wants to die for GIFs?”
If you too want to fight back, join me in Making GIFs Great Again (MGGA)!
One of the things I did immediately was return to my GIF making guide for GIMP I documented for ds106 almost 15 years ago because I found my best GIFs were often hand-crafted. The problem with that guide is MPEG Streamclip is no longer supported on Mac, so I needed to find another tool to break a movie clip down to individual images. I ultimately landed on loading ffmpeg on my Mac using Homebrew:
brew install ffmpeg
After that, I used terminal to navigate to the folder where my clip(s) lives and ran the following command with the name of the movie clip you want to breakdown to isolated images. I recommend the clips be about a second long for best results with this method.
fmpeg -i divine_die_for_art.mov image_sequence%06d.jpg
I found using the jpg extension versus png keeps the GIF much smaller, and it should weigh not much more than 1 MB or so if you have about 15 images—which I found to me the sweet spot thus far. Anyway, if you are gonna die for anything in these tumultuous times it might as well be Art GIFs, let’s show MBS that he’s not above the law!
MBS has been replaced by bad AI?
I say it’s time to bring back the cinemagif styles of the early DS106 days, so much of GIFdom was dwindled to meme crap and reaction gifs. There’s still room for the artful ones.
I was saddened recently that Giphy Create seemed borked last time I tried, at one time it was supreme for isolating a scene from a YouTube video am augmenting text, but it just hung in the rendering stage.
Had some fun combing through my past ones like
https://giphy.com/gifs/netnarr-gifstory-haJKngS7srLbvz25Ut
or this literally happened yesterday
https://giphy.com/gifs/linkedin-slimed-Ke2X5mXIgco8MsIlqC
Let’s have a revival
https://giphy.com/channel/cogdogblog
Damn, seeing all your GIFs in one place on Giphy is impressive, you have been busy! II might have to try and wrangle all my GIFs in one place and I absolutely support a revival, it is time to remind MBS who drives culture. It’s always been the blogging ds106 crowd! Fucking podcasters getting all uppity
Oh oh oh, Mr Kotter! Reading GIFs is Fundamental
https://gif.arganee.world/
I am now curious about the jpg option. I messed with this a year or so ago and just made looping videos because they were smaller and better quality.
Is looping visual media dead? Maybe he was just mad about the compression format.
I’m still dinosaur school and use Photoshop. I felt like in last few years, the compression got better, or maybe I fiddle more with settings for lossiness.
The real plus for me which I do not see in too many tools is that in the timeline tool I can set different durations for frames, so have an intro for a second than a quick flip at 0.2 seconds than a mid stop for 1 etc. This means less frames needed, where most gifs get bloated because they have so many redundant tightly spaced frames.
The thing I don’t understand is we are doing. film podcast and the GIFs can underscore our brilliant insights (which happen all the time without fail). It is a layup for this old blogger, yet he seems to think he is better than ds106. He may have lost his roots š
Pingback: #tdc4918 #ds106 Make Gifs Great Again | The DS106 Daily Create
See here: https://daily.ds106.us/tdc4918/
You beat me to it, Sarah!
I think Jim would like doing Daily Creates. Do you think he is up to the challenge?
It looks as if he is š
I did this one and even stole a GIF from MBS š