Move over, reality television.

February 14, 2018 6:22 AM

Video shoots? Old news. In 2018, there are dedicated GIF shoots.
posted by mosst (35 comments total)

my face when
posted by RobotHero at 6:34 AM on February 14, 2018 [4 favorites]

This defeats the entire purpose of finding an appropriate GIF for a given situation. If they're manufacturing them in advance for your different reactions, it kills the fun.
posted by jozxyqk at 6:36 AM on February 14, 2018 [12 favorites]

????
posted by Pendragon at 6:39 AM on February 14, 2018 [2 favorites]

welp, another one for "when the NYT covers it, it has already jumped the shark"
posted by k5.user at 6:39 AM on February 14, 2018 [3 favorites]

my face when (https://i.imgur.com/q3iCWqE.jpg)

This url ends with a .jpg and goes to a page with an embedded gif. You're making the whole situation worse for me I hope you know that.
posted by turkeybrain at 6:40 AM on February 14, 2018 [7 favorites]

GIFs (pronounced like “gifts” without the T)

Pistols. Dawn.

This is really interesting, I think, in a super-ephemeral way. The shelf life of the GIFs they're shooting has got to be ridiculously short. Like, is anybody going to look at Portugal, The Man's Pizza Day GIF next year? Or even this year? Does anybody actually want these manufactured GIFs?

I'm unclear on the cashflow, though. In the case of Absolut, Giphy is eating some of their ad dollars. Fine. But in the case of the celebs and bands, who's paying whom? The whole thing is really bizarre.
posted by uncleozzy at 6:41 AM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

If they're manufacturing them in advance for your different reactions, it kills the fun.

Welcome to Silicon Valley Capitalism.
posted by suetanvil at 6:42 AM on February 14, 2018

A startup in 2013 that is still not revenue generating with minigolf and indoor slides, putting famous people in a video format that is way past it's prime, and no one is sure for anyone is getting paid.

This is some serious late stage capitalism right here man. Top shelf stuff.
posted by jonnay at 6:55 AM on February 14, 2018 [10 favorites]

The time has finally arrived for I, part of the allegedly tech-oblivious over-40 generation, to create my customized reaction GIFs!
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:56 AM on February 14, 2018

Made-on-purpose GIFs are often.... well, lame, totally Fellow Kids material.

As far as reaction GIFs go, I get a lot of mileage from "Jaguars Fan" because it is perfect for watching something terrible beyond logic explanation unfold, and Family Guy's "Good, Good" bug.
posted by lmfsilva at 6:57 AM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

who's paying whom? The whole thing is really bizarre.

Welcome to Silicon Valley Capitalism.

two accurate comments that comment accurately together
posted by halation at 7:00 AM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

I miss vine though.
posted by mhoye at 7:06 AM on February 14, 2018

I miss vine though.

Vine 2.0 soon.
posted by Fizz at 7:10 AM on February 14, 2018 [3 favorites]

This is the least offensive stupid thing I've seen in 2018. Go for it.
posted by poe at 7:27 AM on February 14, 2018 [2 favorites]

There doesn't seem to be a Foozeball table anywhere in that office. If they want to act like it's 1999, they need to step up.
posted by davebush at 7:29 AM on February 14, 2018

Missed seeing that this was a NY Times link before clicking and wasted my article quota: facepalm.gif
posted by exogenous at 7:31 AM on February 14, 2018

Yeah, very much agree that getting good reaction gifs seems like a better task for the internet hive mind combing through all created content than a single auteur trying to plan ahead.
posted by little onion at 7:33 AM on February 14, 2018

Giphy is the worst.
posted by boo_radley at 7:34 AM on February 14, 2018

Giphy ... is still “pre-revenue,”

boldstrategy.gif
posted by RobotHero at 7:48 AM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

I mean of course branded, manufactured gifs are a thing. Why wouldn't they be, everything's already terrible, let's pile a bit more on.
posted by parm at 7:55 AM on February 14, 2018

> A startup in 2013 that is still not revenue generating with minigolf and indoor slides, putting famous people in a video format that is way past it's prime, and no one is sure for anyone is getting paid.

This is some serious late stage capitalism right here man. Top shelf stuff.

I was just thinking how amazingly similar that office (the slide and "GIVE ME A HUG" teddy bear aside) is to the one at the start-up I had an interview with in 2000; industrial loft with exposed brick, couches, games, etc.. I guess that whole office/clubhouse aesthetic hasn't gone out of style.
posted by The Card Cheat at 8:00 AM on February 14, 2018

The most significant thing about this article is that the NYT Style Section has finally delivered the definitive answer to the question of how "GIFs" is pronounced. It's "gifts without the t", folks. GIFTS WITHOUT THE T.
posted by ourobouros at 8:34 AM on February 14, 2018 [2 favorites]

Giphy ... is still “pre-revenue,”

boldstrategy.gif

gif used in the above joke hosted on giphy.com.
posted by nubs at 9:44 AM on February 14, 2018

As one who has been allergic to peanuts long before it was a 'thing', I cannot support a pronunciation of "gif" that is the same as a brand of peanut butter. Still, anytime the New York Times Style Section agrees with me, I must step back and reconsider my life assumptions.
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:45 AM on February 14, 2018 [2 favorites]

Wait, is Giphy pronounced with a hard G? This whole thing is even worse than I thought.
posted by uncleozzy at 9:53 AM on February 14, 2018

Something about manufactured reaction gifs rub me the wrong way. The fun and challenge of a gif is finding a captured media moment that was totally unrelated but somehow fits the context of the current situation. Extra points for obscurity.

Searching for "smh" and then picking from a list of characters all doing "smh" because they were tasked and filmed to enact "smh" - well that's lazy and boring and defeats the purpose of the gif game.
posted by like_neon at 9:56 AM on February 14, 2018 [3 favorites]

The NYT is getting a lot of flack nowadays, but I will give them credit for putting the picture of the office slide right after the paragraph on how they're not making any money.

Also, I didn't know people pronounced "gift" with a soft g.
posted by ckape at 9:59 AM on February 14, 2018

Anyone who uses one of these GIFs unironically is a cop.
posted by Atom Eyes at 10:26 AM on February 14, 2018 [6 favorites]

giphy killed the youtube star
posted by idiopath at 10:38 AM on February 14, 2018 [2 favorites]

So you'll be a Youtube celebrity
Commissioning a GIF89a
Which will get converted to MPEG
You'll be commissioning a GIF89a
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 11:08 AM on February 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

Man, can you imagine how snarky this thread would be if we still had image tags?
posted by loquacious at 11:22 AM on February 14, 2018 [6 favorites]

I want to say that anyone who uses one of these will be run off the internet, but it's not like viral marketing isn't already a thing. Yeah, some ads are obvious, but there's a whole bunch that aren't, where you have to wonder "does this person just happen to be holding a bag of Doritos, or this a viral ad?" It's that whole Adam Curtis Hypernormalization thing at work, where you can't really look at Reddit and know how many ads you've seen, and they're all counting on that. The HP ad they're filming just shows someone who happens to be holding an HP product, and it doesn't try to show how great that product is, just that people use it.

The future sucks.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 12:06 PM on February 14, 2018 [2 favorites]

but hey MoonPie and steak_umm have funny twitter accounts
posted by idiopath at 1:23 PM on February 14, 2018

No.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:38 PM on February 14, 2018

Related: Goodbye, Mister Clips: The Rise of the Longform GIF (Nate Goldman for Wired, Feb. 8, 2018)

When Jason Walter first created the r/HighQualityGifs subreddit in September 2013, he did so simply as a way to aggregate the GIFs he made in his spare time. GIFs hadn't yet become the juggernaut they are today: Facebook had just enabled them the month before, and Twitter wouldn't do so until that November. Even if you wanted to create one, the technical limitations of the form required a level of Photoshop skill to pull off something worthwhile. Preserving them, Walter thought, was just good sense.

“In the beginning, there was maybe a two-megabyte limit or a ten-megabyte limit [depending on the platform], and you had to create something within those constraints,” Walter says. “It was a skill.” But the challenge was half the fun: his hobby was as much an exercise in economics as it was in software wizardry. Making something that looked good required tinkering with the number of colors the GIF contained, or adjusting the lossy compression—all for a remarkably brief result. “If you could get to 5 seconds on [those size limits] you were lucky,” Walter says.

Five years later, those conditions are all but a thing of the past; those short loops have ceded ground to a more technically and culturally accommodating type of GIF. No longer confined to the inefficiencies of the format and consumption behaviors of the early social web, the graphics interchange format—or at least what it contains—has entered its next stage. Welcome to the era of the longform GIF.

The funny thing is that I have just now discovered Google's almost 5 year old technology announcement: Google+ Photos has a suite of auto-edits it performs on selected photos you upload, under the header "Awesome," including the ability to automatically detect when an image is part of a series and stitch it together in one image or an animated GIF. It also makes certain stable videos (the background remains largely unchanged) and it will pick a certain portion of the video to make a looping video.

I was ASTONISHED by my "discovery" of this. And it came after I was jealous to find that my wife's Samsung Galaxy S 5, which is about as old as Google's "new" feature, can natively capture GIFs in its texting app.

In short: I'm pretty happy to live in the past with goofy little GIF loops.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:32 PM on February 15, 2018