In an effort to make Wonderful Machine a more useful tool for clients and better represent our members’ motion work, the photo editing team spent the last month replacing the motion specialty screenshots with moving gifs.
The idea initially came about during a conversation regarding our motion specialty and how we see it growing in the future. It was clear the first order of business was to find a better way to display our incredible crop of motion photographers, because the screen grabs weren’t cutting it. The most logical upgrade? Gifs. Simple, efficient, and eye-catching.
Creating the gifs took a lot of attention to detail and careful consideration. Some of our criteria included the following:
That’s just the creative side—the technical side presented its own challenges. We initially looked into using online gif-making tools, but the exporting sizes were nowhere near our 700 x 700 px website standard. The only option we were left with was creating the gifs manually in Photoshop, and using a gif optimizer to reduce the file size as much as possible without diminishing the quality. It was a lot of work, but we think the results are pretty sweet.
In the meantime, take a look at a couple of the photo editing department’s favorite gifs.
Left: David Clifford // Right: Ehrin Macksey
Left: Ashley Gieseking // Right: Jeffrey Lamont Brown
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