Clever claymation celebrates 25 years of animated GIFs

Words: Alex Williamson

It's been a historic year for the GIF - not only is it celebrating the 25th birthday, it's more fashionable than ever before, with help from sites such as Tumblr where people's blogs are filled with the pesky little blighters. Designers are now creating artistic high-quality GIFs - usually referred to by the hipper term 'cinemagraph'. Oxford Dictionaries even named GIF as their word of the year.

To celebrate this resurgence of the repetitive and often-annoying animation technique, 'A Short History of the Gif: Moving the Still' celebrates all that's unique about the GIF through the use of claymation and, of course, some GIFs.

What's great about this tongue-in-cheek short is how it uses claymation to create a visual style repetitive in a similar way to GIFs themselves. It's informative, too. Plus we love the goldfish.

Sean Pecknold took charge of the animation at New York and Los Angeles animation and multimedia studio LEGS. The video is a tie-in with the 'Moving the Still exhibition', which showcases GIFS as a new art form in both digital and real space - see this video for more details:

• Alex Williamson is an art and design student in London, who blogs about design, art and illustration. Follow him on Twitter.

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What's your view on the use of animated GIFs? Let us know in the comments below!