Medium Specificity

https://giphy.com/gifs/birdbrow-LW40TCK0cPEuakXeM1/tile

For my project, I made a tiny little animation of a man whose eyebrow turns into a bird. I did this by taking pictures of the different stages of the transformation and combining them all using a gif making app. I’ve made gifs before, but only by converting live photos or videos. I think this is a celebration because this incredibly easy-to-use app takes something that, to an outsider, is very intimidating, and makes it very accessible. I like to draw and doodle, and I think illustrative gifs are way fun. However, I am no illustrator and the idea of creating an animation feels woefully out of my league. But when I first had the idea, all it took was a bit of poking around the app to figure out what I needed to do, and then voila: a weird eyebrow-bird situation was born. I like this because it stretched my creativity while building off a skill I already had, which is frankly my favorite way to create. Gifs, in their own right, are fun because of their repetitive nature: soundless and therefore relatively disruptive, automatically looped, and charmingly digestible. This particular project of mine could be stretched into something more artistically rigorous, or made even simpler.

Some of the limitations that I ran across include how difficult it can be to get your homemade gif off the platform on which it was made and safely stored away for your own use. Gifs are a relatively commodified part of text-based communication, which means that gif-making apps want your gif to be publicly available and/or, worse, branded with their own name. Another limitation is that gifs can only be so long, which is perhaps also a affordance in that you have to condense your work to make the medium shine. But that introduces a whole other conversation about micro-presentation and how short the attention span of the general public is these days (depressing and worrisome). That being said, I do think a gif could be paralleled with an activity like painting a still life on an incredible small piece of canvas. It’s challenging and fun and makes you think differently about the work you’re creating.

As far as aiding students in a similar project, I think being reflective about the chosen medium before going to create the work would be valuable. This doesn’t mean I think my experience would have been better if I had written this beforehand—quite the contrary. But maybe if I had taken just a few moments before I began working to think of one limitation and one affordance of gifs as a whole, I could’ve approached the project in a more thoughtful, analytical way. Something I think could be very valuable is a conversation comparing/contrasting different mediums after everyone has presented their projects, and maybe even a follow-up project transforming the first work into a second medium that someone else previously used. This would allow the project to grow and change with the artist as she learns more.