Ir is interesting to look back on when I presented on GIFs as a form of quick makes.
📑 The GIF Is on Its Deathbed
I think there will always be, at least, a handful of masochists who want to struggle to make a GIF and struggle again to post it somewhere—all because they are devoted to the perfect animated loop, and because they think there is something spiritually important about contorting themselves to create it. “[Igor] Stravinsky has a quote about constraints,” Kohler told me. Then he read the whole thing aloud: “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.”
Kaitlyn Tiffany reflects on the demise of GIFs. She discusses the embarrassing nature in which particular GIFs are used on repeat. In addition to this, the MP4 format is a lot smaller.
Hi Aaron,
Thanks for this link, your pull quote is perfect. As a recovering gif masochists it really struck a chord. I never aimed for perfection just some strange self imposted notion around file size. I blame #DS106 for my may years of gif-addiction.
I don’t know if I’ll every break completely free, yesterday an image on my camera roll cried out for giffing. The modern way, an iOS shortcut resulted in a 2.2MB monster. After a fair bit of command line, with Eddie Kohler’s gifsicle, I eventually opened an older version of Mac os on parallels that could run FireWorks to to squash it to 448KB.
Although making gifs is redundant & silly, it has given me so much fun over the years and I like to feel taught me a lot.
“.. the perfect animated loop …”
Yep
Kevin