Monica Torres November 22, share. Pigment print on canvas wallpaper, installation view, David Petersen Gallery. Hours before its release, the officer was charged with first-degree murder. As soon as the video was made public, it was being published, downloaded, screengrabbed, and reblogged across news sites and social-media platforms. The default for gifs on Twitter is to autoplay, and many users do not opt out. I was among them.
There was no warning that I was about to see something graphic and disturbing, as there was on the cable networks that were also showing the video. Unmoored from even minimal context, the gif felt cheap and tawdry, with each loop replay increasing some engagement metric, while righteously confronting nothing. Her private grief was made public.
But the gif took it even further, creating a grotesque play in which a young black man was always living his last moments, over and over again.
We are deleting. The incident raises the question of whether gifs, simply by virtue of their formal qualities, are inherently trivializing. What effects does looping video of a news event have on what it represents and how it is consumed? Can a gif be serious? Thanks to their engaging movement and internet-native feel, gifs have become ubiquitous across news sites and social media alike. In personal contexts, gifs are widely accepted as fun shorthand for such reactions: My friend texts me about her job; I answer with gifs of Kim Kardashian cry-faces.
But there are limits. Similar limits seem to apply in news contexts. Gifs have become mainstays in sports and politics coverage because they can distill the essence of these competitions into a few arresting looped frames, as in this breakdown of the minutiae of how Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney lost her gold.
Given the broad appeal of gifs, startups have sought ways to further distribute and monetize them. But the same liveliness, immediacy, and novelty that make gifs so attractive to startups and news organizations also make their use in more sober contexts jarring. When gifs delve into breaking-news tragedies — police shootings, natural disasters, terrorism — they tend to cross the fine line between confronting horror and exploiting it.
Without the cushion of context, a gif can land like a punch. When Gawker posted a gif of a Spanish train derailing in , readers said they felt unprepared for their visceral reaction.
Sometimes a visceral reaction is the point: Activists and journalists have long attempted to force people to visually confront the horrors of oppression and white supremacy. In this same tradition, antique collector James Allen collected photos and postcards of lynchings across America, of which were published in as Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.
In its gif form, the disturbing video of his death had become a puppet show, and McDonald a marionette, made to rise and fall, ridden with bullets 16 times, then 32, then 48, and on and on. Animated GIF:. How to make a GIF? Tips for GIF creation You can control the speed for the whole GIF by setting a "Delay time" at the bottom or adjust the delay for individual frames with a "Delay" input box right next to each frame.
It's not advisable to set delay time lower than 2 because some browsers will ignore such values and default to slower animation speed. By default, all frames will be sorted in alphabetical order by filename and will keep the original order if you upload existing animation , you can drag and drop them inside the GIF animator area to rearrange.
Enable the "Crossfade frames" option, if you want to create a smooth, fading transition between images. It's designed to work along side a Stinger Transition, but it will function with cuts or fades or what have you. An example:.
Join the discussion More information. More resources from adocilesloth Resource icon. Recording Stopper Stops recording after a predefined time. Resource icon. Read more…. Latest reviews I3ordo 3. This is well enough for people that priotize streaming over local recording. Because as it does require you point the script to a single replay file with a predetermined filename.
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