Why make an animated gif? Babies and Dogs.

On the FAQ page, I’ve had a chance to go into this a little bit, but I wanted to back it up with a few examples. The simple idea is that a photograph can inspire and deliver an emotional response immediately, but is limited to a single moment in time and can’t convey motion and a few other things in the way that video can. On the other hand, a video or film can have a lot more content, information and emotional payload, but it will require a substantial amount of work to create something of quality and lasting value. Also video requires the viewer to give a certain amount of time, attention and patience for this message to be properly delivered.

Here’s where the animated gif, or better yet the wegif which is a sequential animated photo comes in. Let’s go through a quick though experiment. I call this “babies and dogs”, since there are quite a few wegifs on WeGIF.com that feature babies and dogs, they are perfect for illustrating this concept.

Say you’re in your back yard and your cute little dog is running around being cute. You pull out your camera and try to take a good photo; maybe you especially like the way your dog looks when he turns it’s head quick after looking down. You start taking a few photos trying to capture the moment, and by the time you’re done, you notice that there are over 30 photos that you’ve taken.

Now you have a few options:

• Delete 29 photos and share “the best one” on flickr or some other photo sharing site or service.
• Upload 30 photos to your photo service and hope you’re not going to bore everyone you know.
• Store these 30 photos on your hard drive since you don’t really want to delete them, and think at some point in time in the future you’ll have time to go through them and do something with the best ones.

Ruby with a bone

Let’s first rewind a bit and re-run the though experiment with video instead of photos. You’re trying to capture a moment, and you’ve already recorded for over a minute and your dog hasn’t looked up in the cute way that it did, just before you started recording. One minute, forty-five seconds. It happens! You captured something you liked.

Now you have a few options:

• Upload the unedited video (maybe you don’t know how to edit video) to YouTube. Only problem is that for the first 105 seconds there is absolutely nothing interesting happening. Most users will leave before 10 seconds in.
• Maybe you know how to edit video, but that takes a bit of time, and this task is just not that important to you. Plus the audio happens to be awful and you really don’t want a jazz soundtrack to go along with it.
• Edit the video, get rid of all the boring parts, and end up with a 3 sec video. Upload and tag on YouTube. That’s a lot of work for 3 seconds of video.
• Store the video on your hard drive, show it to friends ocassionally and always scrub to one minute and 45 seconds in, because they don’t want to watch a boring dog video either.

Now we’re approaching our conclusion as we run though this scenario again, with WeGIF in mind. Take your 30 photos or a link to your YouTube video (feature coming soon) and open them in the WeGIF Gif Creator. Cut out all the fat and leave the lean parts. By simply deleting bad photos, you are actually editing and changing in and out points! Right click on a frame and choose a longer duration. Narrow it down to just what made that moment unique and worthwhile. Give it a title and hit the done button. In a matter of seconds you have created worthwhile content that others will appreciate!

Now you have a few options:

• Tag your wegif so that dog lovers everywhere can share this moment with you.
• Send this wegif as an animated gif right inside of an email.
• Hit a button and make this your buddy icon across your IM clients and social networks (coming soon).
• Send this wegif to a friend’s phone. (plus even more sharing options)

Oh one more thing! This article is entitled Babies and Dogs because the same logic applies to baby wegifs:

Joe and Cole