Yes, it’s GIF time again! This is the assignment ‘Animals Doing Funny Things‘ from the ds106 course, AnimatedGIF assignment bank. The instructions were very simple, find an animal doing something funny and make a GIF from it!
For anyone on the internet who doesn’t know, the acronym ‘GIF’ stands for Graphics Interchange Format, and is basically just a small section or clip of video that infinitely loops the same few seconds. There has been some debate in recent years on how to pronounce it, with some claims of it being pronounced ‘Jif’, and for any people that know of this struggle, internet veterans will eat their own keyboards before we say it like that! Unless you pronounce the word Graphics, ‘Jraphics’, then there really is no argument for it. The creator of the GIF Steve Wilhite, announced that he had intended the pronunciation to be ‘Jif’ rather than ‘giff’ but did not make this statement until over 20 years after the existence of GIFs. In my opinion he was just bored one day and decided to mess with the world. A great article on this can be found here from the Independent.
Back to the task at hand! I happened to have been at home and captured a charming video of my border collie Meg in the snow, attempting to bite the snowflakes as they were falling. Again as in my previous post, ‘GIFs and Mewling Quims‘, I used Imgurs Video to GIF converter to create a 5 second clip out of my 30 second video. The post also explains how to use the converter.

Isn’t she cute??!
Readers may see more of Meg in future posts…