Animated GIFs aren’t photos. They’re Twitter for Animation
I’ve been meaning to write a post about the importance of animated GIFs in internet culture but Anil beat me to it:
What’s more important than where GIF has been is where it’s going. As noted above, Tumblr alone has seen a renaissance of the GIF format, amplified by the boundless creativity of image manipulators on communities like 4Chan and B3ta. Jamie Beck’s GIFanimations on From Me To You have been a Tumblr phenomenon, showing how truly elegant the format can be. If we don’t, remember me and three frames demonstrate the power of film through the lens of GIF’s delightful constraints, the former with a mesmerizing fluidity and the latter with a jerky intensity. Even beyond the capture or transcoding of other video works into GIF format, artists are starting to work with GIF on its own terms. Earlier this year, the New York Times illustrated a story with an animated GIF for the first time ever (not counting stories that were about creating GIFs), showing that this uniquely expressive format is truly coming into its own as a mainstream animation format.
The thing that Ronen V and Aaron Meyers made me realize is that instead of being limiting, the size and color restrictions on GIFs have led to something evolutionary. They’re small, lightweight, and have their own language. They’re the Twitter of visual media.
