Gif Cinema

Mr. 100! 2: 

Rise and Fall of Trylo Ren, or 

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Sharks

This was a fun and surprisingly intuitive project. We found that because we had a lot of exposure to gifs we naturally understood how to convey a mood through movement. The limits of how much camera movement we could have while keeping a simple vision came naturally.

We wanted to tell a classic heroic tale because we thought it would be interesting to isolate the critical moments on a familiar journey (a hero discovers people in need, is defeated, discovers their destiny, overcomes the odds and defeats the enemy) and see how we could augment them with repetition. We also wanted to tell that tale in an atypical medium to see how we could bring a fresh take to a well-trod genre. Using toys on a drawn kind of backdrop made it feel more like a diorama that calls upon the imagination of the viewer to translate that movement into life.

The challenge came from building a narrative. Typically the gifs we interact with are rarely in a set let alone working cohesively to form a story. To solve this problem we gravitated toward movement through, into, and out of the frame as a way to build geographic movement and a plot that develops linearly. Another way that we were able to build continuity is through an established aesthetic shared across the gifs. The gifs function as an amalgamation of a child’s toy box come to life. We liked the idea of and strived to have each of these gifs stand alone and still function, we did not want them to depend upon their place in the set to make sense. Each one can stand alone as an a e s t h e t i cÔ or a #mood.

Captioning was a fundamental part of our process. We wanted each gif to have associated text to aid the deliberately playful and improvisational nature of toys.  In captioning we tried to strike a balance. We wanted to add flavor to the image without overburdening the text with narration or exposition. Our captions contribute largely to our aesthetic, and feel truly embedded into the gif content and form, not just layered on top of it.

Boiling a story down to isolated cyclical moments challenged our understanding of what really makes the bare bones of a story. This experience showed us that the core of a story is made up of beats, moments of action. All you need is action and as you juxtapose pieces of action simply by setting them next to each other the meaning generates itself.  We told a conventional story in an unconventional way. This means that we could rely upon the familiarity of the viewer with the story. We could use the shared knowledge of the audience to carry meaning.