More in GIF history: From 2005 through 2008, Matt Smear ran a GIF-heavy blog, U Mean Competitor. His GIFs are trippy, fast, and gigantic, at least in comparison to most other GIFs on the web. Add this to your notebooks, too: in the pre-Tumblr era, he was one of the few artists who used the vertical scroll format to create a progressive narrative of images. “I found Michael McDonald (part 8)” is an incredible example of Smear’s image-stacking technique.
Go look, but view at your own pace. That’s one reason why today’s GIF takes up fewer pixels than usual; most of his GIFs overwhelm. Is that a problem? No, they’re all the better for it.
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To the GIF Club:
On a personal note, U Mean Competitor is one of my favorite websites ever. I don’t think anyone has used GIFs quite like him ever since (although Cloaque’s scroll ends up being fairly similar). Thoughts?
Have you seen his work on dump.fm? He uploads .gifs pretty regularly under the name Seacrestcheadle.
Sometimes he posts series in which he keeps remixing a found image/movie scene/meme that multiplies in its insanity and glitched out psychedelia. (ex: http://dump.fm/Seacrestcheadle/2013-11-24/11174308 , http://dump.fm/Seacrestcheadle/2015-01-28/13617758 ).
Hi, thanks for sharing my gif and liking my blog. I still make a lot of
gifs. As sstage says, I post on dump.fm, and I also have a tumblr:
http://urmean2computer.tumblr.com/ .
Hi. Thanks, guys. I like your stuff.
His blog is amazing, and it makes me think about what was lost with the transition of so many GIF makers to Tumblr. Early on, Tumblr imposed arbitrary limits on GIF dimensions. Anything above 1MB wouldn’t animate, and posting anything above 500×500 was sketchy. They recently lifted some of those restrictions, but even if you post a giant image, it’s still going to display at about 500×500 in the Tumblr dashboard view.
I like his GIFs, but they don’t strike me as too unusual. What’s unique about them is how they interact with the rest of his page, though – chaotically placed under and over text and links, the images integrated into the years-long ongoing story he’s telling.
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