I have found that gifs are one of the quickest and applicable technological projects in the art classroom through my experience making one. For those who are unaware, a gif, or graphic interchange format, is a short animation composed of images repeated on a loop. Gifs in the fundamental 8-bit realm help students understand the importance of restraints; both in time and composition.
The first step in creating a gif is selecting your content. What do you want the short animation to be? I suggest starting with a simple task. For my gif, I wanted to create a pug walking. I looked at reference photos to help figure out how to compose the starting image with 8-bit. Then I went to https://www.piskelapp.com/ and selected “create sprite”. This website allows you to create each individual image, sprite, which is then composed into the moving images, gif. Below is a screenshot of each sprite acting as a frame in the gif. This helps students understand time because they have to consider the number of transitions and their frequency needed to communicate the action they want to.
After exporting my file as a PNG with a higher resolution, I was able to view my sprite sheet. This has all of the sprites organized showing the gif through nondiscursive time. (see image below)
When I export the file as a gif on Piskel, all of the images are compressed to create the animation; however, this will not play correctly on all formats. By going to http://gifmaker.me/ and uploading the gif file, you can save it correctly in the gif format so that it can play correctly at any time. This was the final step to make my creation come to life in real time. (see gif below)
Creating a gif allows students to bring their artwork to life and develop a better understanding of discursive time in art. They also grasp how to work with a restricted composition because of the way the image is composed of small boxes. When analyzing this project with the SAMR Model, it is evident that the gif animation allows for a substitution of the traditional flip-book to create a sense of time. I would highly recommend implementing this project as a lesson for any junior high school, or high school. It is a project that highly provokes student interest and gives students a larger platform to share their work on social media with whoever they desire. It highly promotes the importance of visual culture and teaches students how to make meaning of the different types of art they encounter.
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