What is a GIF?

A GIF (Graphical Interchange Format) is an image format invented in 1987 by Steve Wilhite, a US software writer who was looking for a way to animate images in the smallest file size. In short, GIFs are a series of images or soundless video that will loop continuously and doesn’t require anyone to press play. This repetition makes GIFs feel immediately familiar, like the beat of a song.

I then wanted to go one step further and develop my own GIF use the software Adobe Photoshop. Before doing this I would have to photograph one specific objects and variations of the objects shape and size, the object I decided on were water bottles. I chose bottles because of their common use in the everyday world and how easily they can be obtained, I then gathered together the classes bottles and proceeded to photograph them in the same position as the first, giving off the impression of the bottle changing as the frames moved. For one of the animations I wanted to add shapes moving around the screen to see whether it would effect the overall outcome and create a more aesthetic result. When I came out with the final result I made sure to put each frame at 0.2 seconds so that the animation seemed more fluid, these were my results:

Once I had made the GIFs I found that they related to the topic of variation and similarities through their constant transitioning between different styles of bottle. By doing this in future posts it would allow me to experiment with variations of some of the things photographed such as reflections and rock formations but taken in a topographic way where all subjects are taken in the centre of the image so that their transitions in the animation are smoother.