As the GIF continues to evolve into a format favored by artists, rather than just Tumblr users, it’s hard not to wonder: Where is all this going? The recent creative explosion in GIF-making---like this and this---means there’s an endless online bank of animated loops to delight in. But even the most inventive of these are bite-sized visual snacks, not developed narratives.
From the look of this new GIF graphic novel (it’s straightforwardly titled GIF-Novel), the GIF could have a killer future in graphic novel storytelling. French artist Mattis Dovier and British band Wild Beasts teamed up to create it for The Jameson Works, a new online dossier of creative projects sponsored by the whiskey brand.
In GIF-Novel, a tall and slender Martian-like character finds himself (somewhat mysteriously) in an unfamiliar land of volcanic rock and smoke. He (she?) has crash-landed, and stumbles into psychedelic experiences while trying to find his way. The theme---a robotic human confronting a foreign land---developed after Wild Beasts sent two unreleased tracks to Dovier, and asked him to pick one and build a visual story around it. “It was hard to choose, and in discussion with the band, I realized that they were complementary in their themes. Blood Knowledge is alluding to the human and the past, and Soft Future is referring to the future, the machine, the digital,” Dovier says. They ended up using both tracks.
A teaser video from Jameson offers a quick behind-the-scenes look into how Dovier created the GIFs. With a calligraphy pen and paper, he first sketches out the characters, objects, and setting. GIF-Novel is created in the style of Japanese manga (or animé), but is much more pixelated. Dovier introduced the pixelated look both to nod at retro pixel art, and to create a grid that would let him animate more efficiently. Once the visual elements are decided on, he transfers drawings to his graphic tablet.
This isn’t the first time an animator has used GIFs to create a graphic novel. In 2012 Ryan Woodward created Bottom of the Ninth, calling it the first animated novel. In the futuristic baseball-themed story, frames animate in tiny loops while the bulk of the story gets told in speech bubbles---a traditional comic book tool that Dovier leaves out of GIF-Novel. Instead, his relies on the Wild Beasts’ music and longer and more intricate loops of animation to advance the narrative. It's exciting new terrain for animators: Even within the design constraints of the GIF, there's ample room for manipulating the length of the loop, how it repeats, and how text plays (or doesn't) a role. "This format can be an interesting alternative to video and fixed image," Dovier says. "It doesn't replace them, of course, but it can draw some characteristics from them, and by linking them, it may lead to something else."
Check out GIF-Novel in its entirety at The Jameson Works.
