ENORMOUS ORANGE: The First 2OO
For almost two years I’ve entertained mostly myself with these GIFs. A friend of mine suggested I do a bit of a retrospective. I thought about making a GIF of my favorite GIFs, but I think this will be more interesting.
I started this, oddly enough, because I was trying to find a way to write more. I didn’t want to tweet, blog, throw fiction up online. The idea was to play with the words themselves, flip them around this way and that. Then I learned how to animate in Photoshop, and it was all over. Early on, I did mess around words (“Because, cousin” became this), but I also had a lot of fun with pictures. This simple joke got me thinking that, hey, there’s a lot of potential with these GIF things.
About a year into it, I challenged myself a bit. What makes a GIF a GIF is the movement, the movement. So the challenge became: can I build a single iconic image out of all that movement? Not sure how well I succeeded, but I did learn that GIFs work better with a focal point, an axis to shift on, or something familiar from one frame to the next.
And recently, it’s been about bringing some of design elements into the real world. Sort of like “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” but without Bob Hoskins and with GIFs instead of cell animation. It started with this one.
And now, some of my favorites:
A nice example of how, if you give a GIF a focal point, you can leave the edges rough. It also is a good example of how the payoff can be as simple as a motion we’ve idealized.
This was assembled out of three drawings of the back of one shoe.
This was my most popular GIF ever. What does it mean? I have no idea:
My dog, the General has made it in a lot of these. That’s his fault, for always hanging around. He’s also pretty photogenic, in a bulldog way. I took the four panel comic idea, and tried that out in GIF form a few times.
This was my attempt at a meme. Didn’t go far.
”Can I put my book in your bag?” was a catchphrase I was trying to get people to start using. I’ve never heard anyone else use it, but people recognize it when I say it. I like the sound of it, the rhythm, the repeated “b” sounds in “book in a bag.” It sounds like a steam train chugging along.
That rhythm, how someone bounces from one word to the next, and what happens when you shift from one syllable to two, if you remember from the beginning of this post, is what I set out to do. Here are a few examples. Since I wrote them for the rhythm, I’d recommend you read along out loud.
The always fun visual joke. 1, 2, 3.
I first used Trade Gothic exclusively, and then decided to do my version of hand drawn lettering: the box letters. And once you have box letters, you have boxes. Which means you can put things in them.
GIFs are great for jokes because they have a natural setup and punch line way about them. You go from A to B, and sometimes from A to C. These two GIFs explore two different ways of revealing a picture.
Let’s face, I’m probably popular with toddlers. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
Looking back through 200 GIFs, there’s a lot to talk about. I can see how I learned how to put things together, how to get the timing right, smooth out the frames, work with pauses. What’s next? Holograms. Animated holograms.
Thanks for watching my pictures that flicker.
