Quirky Animated Gifs

Most of us know animated gifs because we've seen them on Buzzfeed articles or they're used on Facebook to show our "Monday struggles", but they can be used for fine art! In past years I have had students create advertisements, but this year I thought we should do something a little more fun. 

We analyzed the purposes of animated gifs in advertising and how they can be used to sell a product. 

Students were tasked with creating a storyboard on paper. We looked at and talked about animation storyboards like Pixar and Disney. We also talked about famous stop motion films like The Nightmare Before Christmas.

From there they had to open up Adobe Illustrator and create multiple artboards, much like a flipbook is created. Students exported the files as pngs. Then, in Photoshop, students imported their png files and created a video timeline, showing a new layer for each animation frame (take a look at the screenshot below).

​Finally, students exported their files as gifs (File>Save for Web) and voila!