This assignment, “It’s A Great Day for Sporting GIFs,” required me to create a GIF.

“Explosive action, athleticism, skill, strategy, teamwork, triumph, and repetition are some elements that make up a sporting activity. Choose a sporting activity and then make an animated gif that represents one or more of these elements. “

https://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/its-a-great-day-for-sporting-gifs/

I chose this particular assignment because I think there are so many elements such as the ones mentioned that contribute into making sports such a popular form of entertainment to watch. I liked the idea of focusing on one element to show in a GIF, to tell the story of this element.

Also, I had never made a GIF before but always wanted to learn how to make one.

The sporting activity I chose was hockey. I made a GIF from the Stanley Cup Finals of Tampa Bay winning.

The main element I think this GIF conveys is “triumph.” It shows the celebration and pride Tampa has after the win.

Making the GIF was not as easy as I thought it would be. I googled how to make a GIF, and read a few articles on how to do it. A few of the first things I tried like adding a shortcut to my iPhone did not end up working, but the third website I went to had instructions that did work.

The easiest method I found in this article was downloading the app “Giphy” to my iPhone.

“It lets you browse and share from the site’s huge library of GIFs, pull images or videos from your phone’s Photo library, or shoot and edit new videos.”

https://www.macworld.com/article/232739/how-to-make-an-animated-gif-on-your-iphone.html

From there, it was easy. I downloaded the app, uploaded the video I found of the Tampa Bay Lightning celebrating winning the Stanley Cup, edited it, and saved it as a GIF.

My Dad has a saying that he loves: “Teamwork makes the dream work.” Certainly, I think this is true in the case of the Buffalo Beauts, who pulled off a miracle and won the Isabel Cup against the Boston Pride last Isabel Cup.

I’ve already done a tutorial on how to make a GIF for my other animated GIF assignment, in case you want to check that out. In the same way as I did making my other GIF, I started out by deciding what I actually wanted to make a GIF of. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a big fan of the NWHL, or National Women’s Hockey League. Specifically, my favorite team is the Buffalo Beauts. Naturally, I decided that I wanted to make a GIF of the Beauts on the ice. I started by finding a short video on Youtube that featured their players, downloaded it, and then used ffmpeg to get myself a folder of frames to use from the video for the GIF.

I then moved the frames for the GIF I wanted to make into their own new folder.

After I had those photos chosen, I opened up GIMP so that I could make my GIF.

Then, I opened up the first photo in the sequence. The next photos that followed in the GIF were opened as layers over the first. By the end, I had 13 layers of images.

Before saving my GIF, I wanted to preview what it looked like. To do this, I clicked on the ‘Filters’ menu, then on ‘Animation’, and then finally on ‘Playback’. Helpfully, GIMP played my GIF on loop.

(Above GIF to show what the preview looks like was captured using Gyazo.)

All that was left to do after checking the preview was to save the GIF. To do this, you need to click ‘File’, then ‘Export As’. Make sure that when naming your GIF, it has the ending ‘.gif’. You can change this manually if you need to.

After learning how to make a GIF for the first animated GIF assignment, making this one was fun and easy. I think I could stand to use more frames for the GIFs I make in the future, but for now, I’m happy even knowing how to make simple GIFs like these.

Guidelines for this assignment can be found here.