Telling stories with gifs and Vines
Alright—you have a story to tell. But you need some visual elements to make it work. You need a gif.
Let’s get cracking:
You have probably seen this type of content somewhere:
This kind of post, done well, can be really funny. You need to find the right gifs and have a solid through line to make it work.
But we can also use gifs for more serious story telling.
And for having fun around big events.
So, how do we make an original gif?
Step one: You need to find a video to gif. I used this one (it was a John Oliver video—they took it down!):
You can use an online gif maker like gifs.com.
I made this gif from the John Oliver video using gifs.com.
I made this one with Giphy.com
There are many other similar ones online, like MakeAGif. The problem is that these apps can limit you. They leave a watermark or they put a time limit on the gif.
To get a clean one, you need Photoshop. Here is a great tutorial. You’ll also need to extract the video you want to work with. SaveFrom.net is one way to download videos of the web—but make sure you are doing it legally.
A gif is really great to use when you need to: punch up a story; make it funny; or show a news event that can be looped.
So when do we use Vines?
Vine is a video looping app owned by Twitter. The two apps are integrated, which makes it great for mobile reporting. Like so:
Vine is only a six second video, so you need to be strategic when you shoot. That said, you can capture really special moments that work almost like a gif.
If it is something longer that you don’t need to capture immediately, consider doing a full video. You can always edit it and pull out the gifs later.
Vine is a great way to tell short stories.
Or show off visual elements of a story.
And now you know how to use gifs and Vines to tell stories!
