Animated GIFs Created with Photographs of Large-Scale Street Art
Animated GIFs are often created with a sequence of photographs, but UK-based artist INSA puts an interesting twist on the concept by mixing the concept with graffiti and time-lapsing. For his GIF-iti projects, he paints large-scale street art pieces on various walls and surfaces (e.g. the side of a truck) over a number of days. Once each version of the piece is complete, it’s saved as a photographed with a camera fixed in a certain location.
After the series of graffiti pieces is completed, the photographs are strung together into unique animated GIFs.
Here’s a time-lapse video showing one of the pieces in the process of being created:
This is the animated GIF that resulted in the end:
Here’s what INSA says about how the GIFs are created:
Photoshop generally comes in at the end, when I’ve done all of the painting and photographed all of the layers. I upload and overlay all of the images and create a GIF. The process is more about the physical act of painting numerous frames, and involves a lot of mental planning, every stage of painting has to preempt the next step, and the final frame needs to lead into the first in order to create a good looping GIF. The thing I enjoy about this process of painting a GIF is that it begins where most artwork ends.
INSA says he only had a point-and-shoot camera and no tripod for some of the pieces, so he was forced to be a little creative with his photo-taking: he sometimes used masking tape to fix his camera to a lampost across the road to ensure that the composition was consistent from shot to shot.
Here are some more of INSA’s finized GIF-iti pieces:
If you’d like to hear more about this work from INSA himself, Adobe recently did a two-part interview with the artist here and here.
Image credits: Photographs by INSA/Adobe and used with permission