http://www.gifyoutube.com/gif/ZKkyj3

The first person I thought of when making a gif was Emma Stone. She makes the greatest faces when she acts, and they’re hilarious. Since I love food and Emma Stone, I wanted to capture this clip of her saying “Yum” from Easy A. The way she says it with her facial expressions is perfect. I created this gif by adding “gif” to the youtube URL and edited that way. One problem that I had when creating this gif was timing. I didn’t want to get the beginning of the 15 second mark because the waitress is in this section, but it was unavoidable due to the system and the timing of the video. However, I like the way it turned out and the gestural mode adds to the overall effect.

Because it’s flu season and I could not come to class friday, I have double the memes today. My first meme is the Bad Luck Brian meme, themed around our homecoming game this weekend. Because how many of us stumble to the game realizing we don’t have our student ID’s and cannot actually get in. I know I have definitely been there, and I’m pretty sure Brian has too.

Bad Luck Brian

For my gif, I wanted to highlight the fact that it is Monday and here in Blacksburg that means rainy weather, flu symptoms running rampant in every classroom, and a full day of test prep and homework. So much like Rod Kimble in the movie Hot Rod, soaring through the sky and looking amazing like I felt on the weekend, he tumbles down a mountain for a substantial amount of time. That mountain is my Monday.

         MONDAYS GOT ME LIKE

I think a comparing a gif and a meme is hard because they serve different functions. A meme is meant to be simply a photo and  text and the beauty of it is that many of the same photos are used over and over with people manipulating the text to personalize the theme of the meme. An example is the Bad Luck Brian meme that people manipulate to be ironically unlucky in a variety of situations. A gif usually isn’t a template that people manipulate, but rather different videos that are particularly funny. I think gifs are more reliant on the actual video content than any textual mode. Also, people upload gifs of themselves doing funny things, like a short youtube clip– they aren’t reliant on themes or context as much as memes.

GIFs

About This GIF

One of my favorite TV shows is Friends, and there are countless moments where the body language makes the scene ten times funnier than it would be otherwise. I decided to take one of these scenes where the gestural mode of communication is the main mode. This image of Joey screaming could have any caption about hearing or seeing something upsetting, scary, or otherwise unpleasant and it would be funny. I really like this GIF and think it works well as a brief one-second clip!

This is Bido the cat slapping a kitten. My friend showed me the video a couple years ago, and it hasn’t stopped being hilarious yet. I wanted to capture the part of the video where Bido gets mad and slaps the kitten, since that’s the good part. I wish I could’ve gone a half second later for the starting point of the gif, but I think that it worked pretty well overall. The gestural mode makes it easier to be funny. A picture of a kitten being slapped by a cat is so-so and requires text to make it funny. A kitten falling over will make anyone smile.

Today we had to make a GIF and I decided to use “the routine” from Friends as my GIF. I specifically chose the last part of the routine because the pose is my favorite part. A caption for my GIF would be “when I get an A on a test.” I wanted my GIF to be a success GIF because the routine was able to get Ross and Monica airtime at the event they were at.

When I wake up and there is still a pig in my apartment….

I thought maybe Stanley the pig was a dream or a joke. But no – I woke up this morning, and there was still a pig snorting around the living room. So, with that in mind, this GIF is an extension of my feelings about the new pet. The supposedly “cute, small, pink” teacup pig is really more like this big, ugly, slobbering pig in my mind. He sneaks up out of nowhere, and in no way is it cute.

I think the ability to add the gestural mode in this case just adds some detail and reality. If it had just been a still photo, there would have been a lot less detail. The way that this clip zooms into a close-up of the face of the pig makes it humorous because you can see the gross chewing and slobber of the pig – which is just one part of the story.