This week we explored how printing becomes animated! We’ll make physical animations with our Andymation Flipbook Kits, and make digital animations with online GIF Makers!
Flipbook Kits
Your flipbook kit has everything you need to make a flipbook, including instructions as well as an example flipbook!
GIF Makers
There are plenty of browser-based GIF makers out there! You can use either a video or a collection of images as the source of your GIF.
What is a GIF?
The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap (read: raster, not vector) image format that was released in 1987 – wow, that’s early!
In its simplest form, a GIF (pronounced “gif” or “jiff”) is just an animated image – it’s just an image file. Like the JPEG or PNG file formats, the GIF format can be used to make still images. But the GIF format has a special feature—it can also be used to create animated images.
We say “animated images” because GIFs aren’t really videos. If anything, they’re more like flipbooks. For one, they don’t have sound (you probably noticed that). Also, the GIF format wasn’t created for animations; that’s just how things worked out. See, GIF files can hold multiple pictures at once, and people realized that these pictures could load sequentially (again, like a flipbook) if they’re decoded a certain way.