Animated GIFs and Cinema Animations
Giphy is the world’s largest search engine for animated moving images, also called GIFs. In this guide, we’ll explain exactly what’s behind it and how to use the platform’s GIFs.
In today’s communication via social networks and messengers in singapore based animation company, GIFs are almost standard. No matter if you want to express emotions or just share funny excerpts from videos: GIFs are used by millions of people every day. One of the biggest search engines for the often entertaining animations is Giphy.
The portal was founded in 2013 and currently has around 50 million visitors per month – and the trend is rising. GIF search and use via Giphy is free. You will find not only video scenes, but also time-lapse shots of sports events, as well as emotional and iconic moments from film and television. Basically, almost any situation can be packed into a GIF.
Search and share GIFs with the Giphy app
You can access the GIF search engine not only via your computer, but also via the mobile app, which you can download for free for Android and iOS on your smartphone. Once you have opened the app, you can start searching for a GIF at the top of the magnifying glass icon. The home page also shows the most popular moving images currently available.
Once you’ve found an interesting GIF, tap to select it: Afterwards, all networks in which you can share it will be displayed below the moving image. If you click on the three-point icon in the Share menu, you can also download the animation via a download button. The menu also lists keywords that match the product: Choose a keyword – and Giphy will show you more GIFs with this keyword.
Make your own GIFs
On Giphy you can not only find GIFs, but also create them yourself: You just have to go to their website on your PC and click on “Create” in the upper right corner. Then you can choose whether you want to use your own photos or videos for GIF creation or scenes from a YouTube or Vimeo video. If you decide on a clip, you have to cut it afterwards and decorate it with colors, fonts and other logos. Once you’re done, just go to “Continue to upload” below and the GIF will be created.
Giphy is integrated into these services
However, you don’t need to download the mobile Giphy app to share GIFs: Meanwhile, the service has been integrated into numerous apps – including Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter and Slack. In most cases, you’ll find a GIF button in the respective applications when you create a post that you can use to search for and embed GIFs. You can find out how this works with WhatsApp in a separate guide.
GIFs – a legal grey area
But the flip book should be enjoyed with caution: Many GIFs contain material from film and television and depict real people – which means that the use of moving images in this country is not always legally protected. Although we are still in a grey area, you should always be aware of the imprecise legal situation, for example if you want to post a foreign GIF on Facebook publicly.
Giphy is a search engine that lets you find and share GIFs
You can use the service on your PC, but also via the mobile iOS or Android app.Giphy is also integrated with some social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.Because GIFs often contain real people or footage, their use is a legal grey area.
Cinema 4D
What can this 3D animation software do? If you’re looking for ease of use, Cinema 4D is probably the software with the most intuitive approach. Thanks to OpenGL and the real-time preview, this animation program also convinces with its depth of field and great reflections, which are very easy to control.
Since the models already look great in the program, you can also export them directly if you want to show them to your customers. The Bodypaint function can now also be used in real-time view. This means that you can see the results of your changes right away. To increase the rendering speed, Cinema 4D has a LOD tool (“level-of-detail”), which allows objects to be displayed less accurately in the background and thus calculated faster.
There are different approaches to 3D animation in this program. Cinema 4D has a large number of intuitive functions for figure animation. For example, you can record the movement of your mouse pointer and convert it into position data. You can use direct and inverse kinematics and simulate motion sequences such as walking with a parametric tool. Last but not least, you can add muscles to your figures to give them a more natural look.
The latest versions of this 3D animation program significantly reduce the amount of work, as they can mirror the commands for individual body parts to others. It has also become easier to fuse 3D animated objects and live images together. The “Scene Reconstruction” feature ensures that figures fit exactly into environments.
