Art of the Animated Gif - Why did I choose it?

Mission 1: Creativity
For our first mission in Introduction to Digital Media we had to research and present on one of the following: Art of the Animated Gif, Digital Audio, Augmented Reality, Interactive Fiction, Gaming, Adaptation,Remixes and Mashups, Critical Making or Creative Coding. In class we all looked into each mission and thought about which one we thought would suit us an interest us the most. I read through each brief and compared them to see which one I thought I was most interested in. For me personally I thought this mission was thee hardest one to decide on, I thought every topic seemed really interesting to learn about. The two that I looked into most were Art of the Animated Gif and Augmented Reality. In the past few years AR has become massive with the likes of Pokemon Go and off the back of the success of this there was a Harry Potter inspired game released. I thought it'd be interesting to look into it more but in the end I decided to go for the Art of the Animated Gif. Looking into the goals for this mission I realised I didn't know much at all about Gifs, I use them every day so thought this one would be best one for me.                   

The goals for this assignment includes the following:

-To research and learn about the design and history of the Gif format - when did it all start? what inspired it? who created it?

- Learn about the technical specifications of a Gif File

-Learn about how Gifs are used in different communities

- Learn about the different tools to make Gifs - What apps or software could I use to make the gifs?

-Make my own Gifs - when finishing learning about the different ways to make Gifs I would make them myself.

In our groups we had to split into teams of 2 or 3 to achieve the goals above. The Art of the Animated Gif turned out to be a really popular one and majority of my group chose it, I ended up doing my research and presentation with Mia and Andrew. Before we started our research into the presentation we spoke about the goals and what we each had expected to learn while doing this mission. We decided what each one of us would do to complete it and got to work.

Next blog post coming soon,
Seán