Gif It Good

Hello everybody! This week I met with my group, Alt-F4, and started working on our radio show. We really got to dig deep and talk about what we want for our show. Needless to say, it’s going to be amazing.

For the first week of our radio show, I was tasked with creating one promo poster/bumper sticker/logo etc. I decided that we really needed a cool logo gif. I think a gif is a little different than just a stationary logo because it has motion and depth.

Below is the gif I created.

 

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Behind the Process

I made this gif when our group was all together. We decided that the Binary font and the Binary hex color text would be our standard/go-to. Being me, I had to use the Matrix falling code video some way. The falling code ironically matches our theme so it actually makes sense in the gif. Moreover, Chris suggested using the TV cutaway effect to end the gif. This was a really good idea as it gives our gif a feeling of finality.

To start this assignment, I downloaded the Matrix falling code video and the TV cutaway. I then went into Final Cut Pro and set my canvas as a square. I then combined my clips and titles to get the video I wanted. Afterwards, I exported my video and created the gif in Photoshop.

One difficult thing about this assignment was finding the TV cutaway effect. After some googling, I finally found a video that worked. However, I ran into issues because of the white square that minimizes to get the effect. After playing around with transitions and effects, I decided to cut the video to the final seconds. This gave it the effect we wanted, but did not include the overwhelming white of the clip. So, I really learned to use jump cuts as transitions did not really work in this short video/gif.

Something I would do a little differently was to make the title last a little longer. Nevertheless, I think because the gif loops the title is still visible. I think that acknowledging the loop of a gif and the other limits of the format was something I did well. Having worked with gifs a lot, I found it easy to keep my video short so that when I transformed it into a gif the quality loss wouldn’t be too bad.

I liked this assignment because I got to create a different type of logo. It was really fun to make this as it was the first branding for Alt-F4. I think that gif logos are something I would do again. I think that they are a different take on a logo and can add a je ne sais quoi to a brand.

Well, that is it for now folks. I’ll catch you on the flipside.