GIFs are part of the Internet's foundation. You know how to find them, and you know how to perfectly deploy them on Twitter, Tumblr, or in a group text. But do you know how to make them?
For such a simple file format, making GIFs has always been surprisingly complicated. The team at Giphy knows that well; much of the company's business comes from its partnerships, making GIFs for movies and brands. At the same time, the team sees an opportunity to redefine what a GIF really is—and they're releasing a new app, called GiphyCam, that gives anyone with an iPhone the ability to both make and star in their own GIFs. It's free, it's iPhone-only, and it's a lot of fun.
Right now, GIF and meme are mostly synonymous. We send around funny images with blocky writing on top of them, we explain our emotions through endlessly looping puppy faces, or we drop that amazing animated photo of Stephen Colbert eating popcorn. "GIFs are working," Giphy COO Adam Leibsohn says, "and they’re really excellent because what they do is borrow from culture." He says in the Internet age, as content flows freely, these cultural touchpoints—movies, TV shows, and the like—are the commonalities through which we interact. But we've thus far ignored that what we actually want to do online is connect to each other.
"You send me something, I want to react to it," Leibsohn says. "Now I can react with me. I can make myself the content! And that was what was missing before." That's why GiphyCam makes you the star. You can set up backgrounds, effects, or filters, and then point the camera either on you or something else. Tap once on the camera's shutter button, and it takes a burst of photos that it then stitches into a sort of stop-motion video. Tap and hold, and it shoots a smooth video. Either way, presto: three seconds later you have an endlessly looping GIF ready to be shared to social networks or saved to your phone. It's you—surrounded by thumbs-ups, floating through space, or dropping the Deal With It glasses onto your face.
In the middle of our conversation, Leibsohn has a revelation. "I would call them memoji!" he blurts out. "I just thought of that now. But it's like, that's what we're doing." Here's what that means: Giphy's grandest ambition for GiphyCam is to be a more powerful, more personal version not just of animated GIFs, but of emoji. "We already know that GIFs are the next wave. GIFs will kill emoji." Before I can remind him that this is hardly a universal opinion, he continues. "They’re better, there’s more variety, there’s more color, there’s more cultural equity to draw from because there’s so much more content out there. And instead of using that content, you can use yourself."
Giphy loves the notion that GIFs aren't just funny jokes, they're a communication tool. One both universal—every platform worth its salt supports GIFs—and personal. Julie Logan, Giphy's director of brand strategy and "queen glitter bomb," sees a clear difference between today's emoji and GIFs. "[Emoji] are great at telling you what I am feeling," she says.The thing about GIFs is that it’s making you feel that." I'm not just telling you I'm laughing, or crying, or doing the salsa—you're seeing me do it. "And it's incredibly powerful."
The team at Giphy hopes the app will inspire its own art form, like the six-second limits in Vine or the square images in Instagram—what unique things can people do in the space allotted by a GIF? Logan brings up the idea of the perfectly-looping GIF, that plays forever without stopping. She says she's excited to see how people make these perfect loops on their phone, and how inspired they'll be by its ease.
But let's be realistic: Emoji aren't going anywhere. And Giphy has a pretty significant challenge in front of it, if it wants to reinvent how we use GIFs. The ones I've made in GiphyCam are fun, and simple, but they're low-fi. Can these apps divorce the file type from their jokey nature, and turn stilted moving images into the future of communication? Giphy certainly thinks so. And if it's right, GiphyCam could become incredibly important—the way we show feelings, reactions, and emotions not just through a yellow icon, but with ourselves. In 2015, we are all emoji.
