The Art of the Animated GIF

theodp writes "Some artists work in oils, some in pastels, some in acrylics. Photographer Jamie Beck and motion graphics artist Kevin Burg? Their medium of choice is animated GIFs. 'We wanted to tell more of a story than a single still frame photograph but didn't want the high maintenance aspect of a video,' said the two of their unusual collaboration. Needless to say, these are not your father's GeoCities 'Under Construction' GIFs — it can take several hours of manual editing for Beck and Burg to breathe the whisper of life into each image."

Re:Uhm..

[no known priors]

Apparently I'm not the only one who dislikes the design. from here [giraffeforum.com]:

When Gawker Media launched a big redesign in February 2011, its traffic halved. That can happen because even when you do good things, people don’t like change. It can take them a while to adapt to the new environment. So, assuming for a moment the Gawker redesign was a good thing, have things picked up again?

“Turns out, according to Gawker’s public statistics, things are much, much worse than was originally reported,” The Atlantic Online states. “Yes, the redesign cut traffic in half almost instantly, but instead of coming back, even more readers left the site behind.”

Re:Uhm..

[ndogg]

Skip Gawker. Go to their website directly:

http://fromme-toyou.tumblr.com/tagged/cinemagraph [tumblr.com]

And yes, they are truly beautiful animations.

APNG is still my fav.

[Dayofswords]

lossless + animation = movie-like images

Re:Wake me up for animated pngs...

[phantomfive]

Despite what many people believe, GIFs aren't limited to 256 colors [ipal.org]. Although you would have realized that if you'd actually read the story. It may be another 10 years before animated PNGs are universally supported [wikipedia.org].

Re:Why not use SVG

[antimatter15]

No, SVG is for vector graphics and can't encode a photograph (losslessly anyway with any decent speed) as a SVG document. Plus, the file size would be huge. There's lots of things SVG would be great for, stick figure animations and throbbers. But not this.

They are effectively though

[Sycraft-fu]

That page you sent people to is a good example why. the 32k GIF renders extremely slowly on both FF4 and IE9. It goes one block at a time. Also, when I looked at the properties of it in FF, it only showed the first block, and then proceeded to do so on the page, even after a reload. Not the kind of thing you want on your webpage.

Also there's the fact that precious little saves them. The reason is that the GIF format does actually NOT support more than 8-bits per pixel. What they are doing to make those high colour GIFs is messing with animation. You make a non-looping animation that doesn't render the whole image area, but rather tiles. Fine but:

1) It is a rather hacked way of doing things.
2) It is slow in most browsers (as I pointed out).
3) It defeats any hope of having an animated GIF since it is using animation.

For all practical purposes, GIFs are limited to 256 colours. In the case of animations you get 256 per frame, and the frames don't have to be the same though some programs may not support that correctly.