Producing the Art of the Animated Gif

This blog post is going to be about how I actually went about completing this mission.

As I said in my previous blog post, the topic that we decided to focus on was the art of the animated gif. For myself personally the reason that this one stuck out for me was because of how massive Gifs are on social media and how often I use them myself. Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Reddit are all websites I use myself and it’s available on all of these, it’s also available on message sharing apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and even iMessage for iPhone users.

When we picked our groups to work with on the mission myself, Andrew and Mia created a WhatsApp group between us, in this we shared our progress throughout the mission and asked eachother for advice if we ever got stuck.

The first thing that I did was researched the history of the Gif format. One of the articles that I read was titled “A Brief History of Animated GIF Art”, it was really informative and gave me loads of interesting content to include in my presentation. It was a great article because it had four parts to it covering the past three decades, it was published by Paddy Johnson in 2014 for the website ArtNet News.

The next article that I looked at was regarding how to make a Gif - it was written by Eric Ravenscraft in August 2019 for the website “Lifehacker”. He basically suggested all the different ways you can make Gifs no matter what device you’re using - desktop, laptop or mobile device. Some of the apps/websites he suggested to do it were Giphy (probably the biggest and most famous), ImgPlay and ScreenToGif. It was really handy how he done it as he gave step by step guides on how to use it and which device it worked on. The app I actually decided to use in the end was Momento, I’m an iPhone user so just downloaded it from the AppStore and it was so easy to use, all I had to do was basically upload a picture from my gallery that I wanted to turn to a Gif and the app did all the work. It’s also a free app which is a bonus. The picture that I used for my Gif was taken during Peer Mentoring from a few weeks ago and includes me and two of my friends from the course.

When Andrew and Mia had finished all of their work on Microsoft Word we put it all together on a PowerPoint and presented it to the rest of our group in the Lab. When designing the layout of the powerpoint I had to make sure each slide looked the same as the last. I think the design and layout of a presentation is definitely a really important aspect in these missions because if I was watching one and it was messy and hard to follow I'd be put off concentrating.

My next blog post will be about reflecting on the mission. It will include what I though went well, what didn’t and what I learned from doing this mission.