 We live in a digital age where texting has become largely preferential to voice. The Verge of staff is scattered around the globe and as such we spend a majority of our days, social and otherwise, in chat rooms and mail clients. But text only says so much, it never really conveys the right emotion, or any at all. You can always use a smiley face but, well, that isn't always clear either. So for a majority of our communication, we use GIFs. Lots of GIFs. I think I want to do that one. Yeah I want to add that. But then I was riffing and didn't know where to go after that. Alright I think I know how to do it. Think of it as an artisanal emoticon. Lighter than a video, heavier than a still, perhaps deeper than both. An unchanged container capturing human history. Or cat history. Making a GIF doesn't have to be that difficult at all. In fact, for the most basic things we just use a still image and a web applet. Some of our favorite ones include blingy, which has a lot of extra gaudiness and flair. The other one we like is deal with it, which, well. So we're going to make a blingy. Alright so let's go ahead and find the right picture. Alright now we've got Thomas Huston. Let's go ahead and start adding. Let's add a couple of dancing Santas over here. There's Christmas, let's add some snow. Yeah now that is the winter I like. Oh he needs a hat. Oh cats. Cats always work. Alright and now we're set. Sales are nice, but video is really clutch. For us it all starts with the video. Thankfully there's a lot of quality apps that are the most everything you want to do. For OS X we've been having fun with GIF Brewery. It's simple, it's intuitive, and about $5 in the app store it's relatively cheap. For this example we're going to use The Verge's own David Pierce. The next step is arguably the most important. Find your moment. We look for moments that are useful in everyday chat. We typically like to find anything that can convey happiness, frustration, disappointment, or you know when morale is low just a good laugh. Frame rate is the other key factor here and if your app lets you change it we'd recommend starting at 12 frames per second and going from there. The trick to the perfect loop is isolation. As little bit of the moment in time as possible to really ensure continuity or at least fake continuity. Excuse me. Now we have much fewer frames and we've got a full fluid David dance. Because of the limitations of the medium captains really do play a huge part in maximizing the message. Obviously there's no audio with the GIF so let's focus on a subtitle. Now for some apps you can definitely do a frame by frame text but unfortunately for GIF Brewery it's really all or nothing. So let's go ahead and just make a party down David. Alright and with that okay. Hopefully your work of art is ready to be birthed. It's time to export and compress and file size is very important here. As a hard and fast rule we generally shoot for GIFs that are under 1 meg. Typically half that but Tumblr's file size limit is 1 meg. We think it's a good metric. Let's go ahead and really quickly let's throw that on some kind of sharing site. So that's the basics and it really should cover most of what you're going to want to do. Both the Verge video team and dev team swear by using professional software like Adobe's Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Apple's Motion. And it really makes sense when you think about it because these are professional software tools that are used to make high quality video and high quality stills. And the GIF just falls somewhere in between those two. Hey buddy what are you working on? Hey I'm just making this advanced animated GIF here. So I'm going to start this project in After Effects although I guess you could do this in Premiere or Final Cut Pro or any other video software. But I'm going to go with After Effects today because we're going to use a couple of the unique features of that program. So I've already imported my video clip. It's David here looking confused, angry, sad. There's a range of emotions in this clip I think. I'm going to drag this onto a new comp in After Effects. I'm going to trim it down a little bit. So I think it would be great to punctuate that moment by zooming in on him. And the reason I'm doing this in After Effects is because I'd like to apply some dramatic motion blur. So that's looking pretty good but I want to punctuate this a little bit more. So of course the font to use is Impact. David Grosz. David Displays Hamburger. And then it cuts off there. So now I'm going to export this but the trick here is to pick a frame rate that's pretty low. This thing started at 24 frames a second but I'm going to lower it down to 12 or 15 frames a second because as you'll see in the next step keeping a GIF small in file size is key to making a successful GIF. And now that we're in Photoshop I'm using CS6 so it'll handle video pretty well. We can scrub through it and check that everything looks okay. But the real trick here is using Save for Web. This is huge so I'll have to resize this down to maybe 500 pixels wide. Another very important part of GIF making is making sure that it loops forever not once. Now just to double check my work I'm going to throw that file into Chrome. Well it's looking pretty good to me. Now for the final step. See what David thinks. So it looks to me like that was a successful GIF. Alright I know it sounds ridiculous but in this modern age we really do think of GIFs as a necessary tool for communication. For really conveying the right emotion and getting your message across. You know at the right time a GIF can be more of a personal statement and less of a random joke. You know just be a random joke.