Mission 1 (Creativity): Pre-Production

There are many options to choose from when choosing the first mission. I decided to go ahead with the "Art of the Animated GIF" mission as it was the most appealing and I had an idea of what to do for it. I also have used Adobe Photoshop so I know that GIFs can be created on it. I'm excited for what I can do with this mission. From that, I joined the Slack channel associated with it.

The next step was to find a like-minded group to start the mission with. Using the Slack channel, you can see who also is interested in the same mission as you. I decided to do it with Justin and Denis and there we formed our group! 

From there, we decided our roles in the group. Justin would research about GIFs, Denis would take the photos created for the GIF and I would create the GIF while experimenting with various types of software and effects.

I decided to do some research on my own using the resources I was given because I wanted a clearer understanding of why the GIF was actually created and why it's still used today. Essentially, It was created in 1987 by Steve Wilhite to send smaller size documents through e-mail as storage back then was a problem. They were only intended to be used for still images but they soon realized that they could create "moving images" through an LZW algorithm. 

The LZW algorithm was however under a patent and the creators of it started charging companies to use it. In protest, many developers started to create their own file sharing file, one of them was PNG. People started using PNGs for still images but no other file could replace GIFs for animated images. These types of animated GIFS were being used to express emotions and feelings.

 Certain styles of GIFs such as Cinemagraph was being used to stop a moment in time and express a somewhat relaxing feeling. This is one of my favorite style of GIFs because it's very minimal and able to tell a story with it. 

Throughout the whole GIFs, by far the most popular are the "memes". They are very easy to understand and have been adopted on the internet on sites such as "Twitter" and "Tumblr". Websites such as Giphy have been created as a way to upload GIFs and share them. The popularity for GIFs have been on the rise ever since and I hope they will used more in an artistic way.