Do you love GIFs? Have you ever dreamed of showing your work at one of the world’s greatest museums of art and design, The Victoria and Albert Museum? Well, now you can combine your love of GIFs and your ambitions in our exciting new project. We’re looking for Dundee residents to take part in a digital exhibition which will be shown at the V&A Digital Design Weekend as part of this year’s London Design Festival on 26th and 27th September 2015.
The digital exhibit will be a Dundee City GIF wall, featuring The UK’s only UNESCO City of Design from the perspective of its locals in a series of GIFs. The City GIF Wall creates a new way for a number of citizens to engage with the city playfully, projecting their short form video clips about Dundee on to city walls, showing the city’s vibrancy and personality in a highly visual and accessible way, as an alternative to advertising. We’re showing gifs from Dundee and Mexico City as the project was developed at Small Society Lab in June this year.
To take part, simply make a GIF of Dundee – it could be anything from your favourite street, your commute to work, a music gig or simply the view from your house – the more unique the better, although please keep it family friendly!
If you’ve never made a GIF before don’t fret, it’s very easy to do. Simply take a short video or a series of photos of something you find interesting or exciting about Dundee. Then, follow the instructions on GIF making using sites such as imgflip.com, makeagif.com or download FREE GIF making apps for your smartphone including GIF Maker, Gifboom or Photo to Gif (some of which you can film GIFs directly on the app) and voila, the hard work is done for you. If you’re familiar with Photoshop, you can follow the instructions in this tutorial as an alternative which will allow you to control the size and quality of the GIF.
Check out this example by John Paterson which features a range of different pubs in Dundee for inspiration or the GIF our digital producer, Darcy,made on their way to the office this morning.
And that’s it! Sounds like fun, right? You get to show off what you like about Dundee and you could have something you’ve made featured in an exhibition at the V&A.
Creative Dundee’s top tips for making GIFs:
- Film/take photos in landscape mode – this saves the image getting squashed if we need to resize it.
- Make sure you have adequate lighting, if it’s too dark we might not see the main focus of the image.
- Make sure these are your own GIFs, please don’t steal someone else’s work.
- Stay safe – please do not try and capture footage from a place which may lead you to injure yourself or others.
- Finally, have fun! Enjoy making your GIFs and showing us what living in Dundee means to you.
Once you’ve made your GIF, please email it or post it to Twitter using the hashtag #DundeeGIFWall by 9am on Monday 21st September to be considered. You can email or tweet as many GIFs as you like however as much as we’d love to show every GIF sent to us, we can’t promise that each GIF will be included.