Click on image for Gif to play
Gif’s were created by Steve Whilhite in 1987 while he was working at Compuserve. Gif stands for graphic interchange format and despite the controversy, Whilhite says that it is pronounced like JIF, the peanut butter brand(CNN). Today, gifs are seen all over social media, especially tumblr, twitter, facebook, reddit and ifunny. Gifs were even used when MySpace was around, crazy! Because gifs have become so popular and can be used in numerous ways, both Apple and Android have added full gif keyboards to their products for users to use at their leisure.
I chose to work on the Animated GIF module because I have seen them all over the internet and wanted to learn how to make them myself. I found many of the suggested readings attached to the module to be very helpful in learning more about how gifs came to be as well as how to make them. Using the slack channel was also helpful because it allowed me to see what other platforms people were using to make their gifs which allowed me to explore those different websites and methods.
The gif that I made used the program imgeflip, where you take a series of pictures and compile them into a gif. While making mine I played around with several other gif making platforms like GIPHY and GIMP but I settled on imgeflip because these were pictures that I had taken myself. I didn’t have to worry about whether or not I had the right to use them because they were pictures that my family and myself had taken during our summer vacation. Overall, I am pleased with how my gif turned out. My only criticism is that you have to click on the image in order for the gif to play in a separate window, but considering it is my first experience with gifs I’m okay with that. I’m not the best with manipulating technology, but having done some background reading I’m content with my final product.