Mission 1 - How We Did It

Right off the bat, we had explored the prompt questions on the website. This gave us a good sense of what our aim was and also what we already knew about this topic. We all gathered research, explaining different sections of the creation of a gif. The research was quite simple as gifs are so popular, it leaves people with a curiosity. With the way media and the online world is changing, news outlets and social media often react and there was plenty of articles online to help aid in our research.

We then looked into different videos within our Halloween theme. We wanted something funny and light hearted. We settled on jump scares with funny reactions, and found that the majority of them were small kids. It also showed off a side that we didn’t discuss – gifs being used to convey reactions online. Our gifs could’ve been used if someone was surprised or shocked and wanted to show this over text, for example. This was something I didn’t realise until after we had chosen the video but I thought it was interesting. I also thought it was interesting to see that reaction gifs and really, most gifs, are often just used to convey a reaction or get a reaction. It really gave me a further understanding of the use of gifs in our online communities.

I then explained creating gifs to the group. I showed three different ways – online, open sourced software and closed source software.

We used giphy as our online gif maker. This was successful but we realised that we were limited in how much we can do with it. For the everyday reaction gif, it was perfect – easy to use, straight-forward and free. If it was for the use of a company or something professional, it definitely would’ve needed to be better.

Then we used Instagiffer for our open source gif maker. This wasn’t very good. It was too finicky, and very much a guessing game as to if it would work or not. We really struggled with this one. We had some perfectly fine gifs and some that were jumping or repeating frames.

Lastly, for our closed source gif making software, we used PhotoShop. This is something that is tedious and requires previous knowledge but it doesn’t limit what you can do at all. If you have the knowledge and understanding of the software, it does make it much easier. Someone said that they wouldn’t be able to repeat what I’d done as they just didn’t have any PhotoShop experience. It was quite easy to do, though, and worked smoothly. There were no mess ups and I liked how much control I had when making the gifs. It just shows the difference between what something free versus something paid for actually changes the results. Instagiffer and Giphy didn’t require much skill or knowledge but were limited and free. PhotoShop was paid for but the limits just didn’t exist beyond my own knowledge.