Gif Cinema: Artist's Statement

Gifs are a medium that exists somewhere between still and moving image. It differs from cinema in that they are much shorter format and are looped, meaning that they repeat their sequence endlessly. Gifs are more self-contained than film but offer more information, movement, and versatility than a photograph. Gifs also only exist digitally, as they are a specific file format. A gif cannot be really printed and hung on your wall or played in a movie theatre. (Though one is a physical limitation and the other a convention.) Perhaps more so than the looping nature of the gif, is this aspect of gifs interesting to me. As with all mediums, there are certain conventions associated with and applied to the usage of gif images. They are used online, most often as a way of heightening or clarifying expression of language on the internet. Like emojis they can portray emotion or add humor and nuance. Some gifs are used as a way of digitally displaying sequences from cinematic media on the internet without the commitment and inconvenience of video clips. Like most new and emerging media, however, the practical use of the gif is only beginning to make way for the storytelling potential of the gif. In the producing of this gif cinema project, our class is joining those who seek to push the boundaries of new mediums. In my own interpretation, I wanted to play off of the traditional usage of gifs to create a narrative similar to how The Blair Witch Project uses documentary conventions to tell a fictional story. I also stayed in the vein of horror. The low quality, slow frame rate aspect of gifs allows for a lot of potential when it comes to horror, hence my gifs of the girl staring into the camera, or the invisible shape moving in the woods. Horror can be more terrifying if it feels real, so I imagined an internet user coming across a true crime/horror story and posting his or her findings on imgur/reddit. I wanted to mimic the way people present stories on the internet, often using gifs as evidence and a tool to build up and draw out the story. In some ways I was able to do it successfully, but the problem with gifs is that they must come from some sort of footage that begins as motion picture. I wasn't quite able to get the footage I wanted, so I had to be crafty and borrow some things from the internet, which worked out, because it's what my fictional author/narrator would have to do, and curating the gifs is part of the conventions of the medium.