Make Your Own GIFs with Storyboard That

What is a GIF?

A GIF is an animated image (different from a video) that can be anything from a short 10 second clip of a cute cat to a hand drawn animation. GIF stands for "Graphics Interchange Format"; think of a GIF like a flip book, except on the computer.

Why Use Storyboard That?

Storyboard That makes it easy to create your own GIFs. Ever wanted your storyboard to move? Or wanted to make a rocket ship take off and land on an alien bunny planet? Making a GIF of your storyboard opens so many possibilities. At the most basic level, all you have to do is download any video storyboard in our GIF format! Of course, you can always make something incredibly fluid and awesome, which might take a little longer.

Can I Use GIFs for Education?

You betcha! GIFs are great for telling really short animated stories, and creating them is a great introduction to the process that many animators and storytellers use to create some of your favorite films. GIFs can also be used to summarize a full story or a single chapter. While dialogue might be hard to read on these fast moving images, students can use captions and action to show the events of a story. Here's some other cool things you can do across different subjects:

• Math: Visually demonstrate basic math (like addition and subtraction)
• Science: Laws of motion, steps of an experiment
• History: Reenact a historical event

How to Create and Download Your GIF

1. Come up with a great idea.
2. Change the amount of cells in your storyboard layout (either traditional or 16x9) to however many frames you'd like your GIF to be.
• The fewer cells you have, the shorter the GIF will be!
3. Drag and drop the art you want to use and create your first scene.
4. Use the "Copy Cells" function to copy the scene into the next cell.
5. Make a slight change - move an item, change a position, or add something new!
6. Continue to copy each cell and move art until you have a storyboard that might look something like this:




7. When you're finished, save and exit.
8. Click "Download" and select the Animated GIF option.




9. Open the file and enjoy your hard work!

While you can do almost anything, there are some limitations to what you can create with GIFs.

• The Storyboard Creator has a limit to the amount of cells you can add per board, so you wouldn't be able to make a full movie (unless you created multiple storyboards).
• Posing and character movement won't be as fluid as live action, so you may have to get creative!
• You can't upload pre-existing videos or GIFs to put in your GIF.
• You can't alter the frame rate or speed of the GIF.
• Titles and descriptions won't export when downloaded as a GIF. Use textables if you want important information to stay inside it!

That being said, you can create awesome and hilarious things! The sky's the limit, so go forth and make your own gif today!

Fantastic Creation by Lily Rose Hage

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