Choose your favorite musician, and then head to Youtube and pick one of their videos to make an animated gif of.

This assignment seemed like an easy and fun way to make my first-ever GIF.

This is a GIF of my favorite artist, Marina and the Diamonds. I was originally not excited about making a GIF because I thought it would be too hard. In one of my previous classes one assignment we could have chosen was to make a GIF and I avoided it because I was under the illusion that making a GIF is hard. I suppose making  a stop motion GIF or a more complicated multi-layer GIF would be more difficult than using Youtube, but this was easy!! 

I selected this music video (“Hollywood”) because it was the most appropriate and least weird of all my favorite songs of her’s. The video I was originally going to choose didn’t have a lot of movement, so I figured the GIF of it wouldn’t look very good. I am pleased how this GIF turned out because it has a lot of color and movement to it, which makes it interesting to look at. I chose this section of the music video because I am completing this assignment on Memorial Day, and I thought it would be nice to celebrate the American-ness of this clip.

To create this GIF I researched a bit first (aka I Googled “youtube to gif”) and then started the process. It was very simple and something I will definitely be using in the future.

Step 1: Find a Youtube video you want to transform a part of into a GIF

Step 2: Alter the URL of the video by adding gif, as highlighted below

Step 3: Choose where you want the GIF to start. Click the time shown on the bottom bar to select an initial start time. Then a blue bar will appear that shows the duration of the GIF. You can slide the blue bar around and see which part of the video looks best as a GIF.

Step 4: Click the green check mark at the bottom left of the screen to confirm your selection of GIF start time. There are other adjustments to the GIF that can be made by using the tool bar on the left, but they weren’t needed for this assignment. Once you are happy with your GIF, click create GIF in the top right corner of the site.

Step 5: Download the GIF, or use the other links, depending on what you are doing to the GIF.

Step 6: While using a WordPress blog, click add media and upload the GIF. When embedding the GIF in a blog post it is important to select full size so that the GIF will play automatically.