Smallblog

by David DeSandro

Apple live GIFs

Today, I tried live-GIFing the Apple event. It was a hoot!

iPhone 6

View the Tweets in my Apple 9/9/14 GIFs Twitter collection.

View all the GIFs on Imgur.

I love the communal aspect of these events. There’s plenty of people doing gag pics, but I figured there wouldn’t be that many GIFs. I had a shot to do something special.

Here’s how I did it:

  1. Have the event video playing.
  2. Record a Screen Recording with QuickTime Player of the video.
  3. Save the movie.
  4. Import the movie in Photoshop. Do GIF workflow. Make the GIF.

The tricky part is that you can’t predict when there’s going to be a GIF-worthy bit. I would keep a recording going so anything would get captured. Then I’d make a judgement call to stop the recording and make the GIF.

I got to capture a bunch of big reveals.

Focus Pixels

But I also missed out on some smaller bits – like Tim Cook waving his rolled-sleeve arms, brandishing a real Apple Watch.

There’s so much work that goes into these events. And then, it’s all over in two hours. All the little moments can be quickly forgotten as the next unveiling tops what you just saw.

Apple Watch smiley

But, c’mon. I wanted favs and Retweets. And hot damn, did it work. This “Twitter on Apple Watch” Tweet got hundreds of engagements.

GIFs (and GIF-like videos like Vine) work so well for events like these. This moment with Tim Cook and Bono was both cringe-enducing and endearing. I don’t think any kind of live-blog could capture it as well as the GIF.