If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an animated gif must be worth some kind of number I can’t even begin to comprehend. If you’ve ever found yourself browsing the Internet and felt compelled to respond with a witty reply, only to come up: wow, mind. blown., golf clap, etc. Then these animated gifs are for you!

With the simple copy and paste of one of the images below you can make your feelings resonate while bathing in the adulation of Internet pundits the world over.

This is the Sifter’s seventh installment of the Awesome Animated Gif Series. If you’re a fan of animated gifs you may want to check out the other installments for more animated excellence. Enjoy!

In this Sifter’s 8th installment of the Awesome Animatead Gif Series we explore the trippier side of animated gifs with these 15 eye-jarring examples. For this post, ‘trippy’ is used in a pretty generic sense. I tried to find a wide variety of gifs that may be considered ‘trippy’ depending on what satisfies that term for you.

If you have any suggestions please let us know in the comments!

Artists like Micaël Reynaud are elevating the animated gif art form to new levels. Reynaud, a freelance designer and stop-motion animation professional, describes his work as ‘hypnotic very short films’ [Source]. The high quality of these animated gifs draw striking parallels to our previous post on Cinemagraphs which are definitely worth checking out as well.

Reynaud’s amazing portfolio of work can be viewed on Google+ where he has an active following. Although he has not delved into his creative process, his work shows a visible amount of time and effort. His skills in stop motion are also very apparent, and the smooth seamless transitions are beyond impressive.

Below you will find a small gallery of Reynaud’s brilliant artwork (give it time to load, these are big files!). Be sure to check out his Google+ for more.

Sports website Deadspin has recently published an epic two-part post of every single Major League umpire’s strikeout call (part 1, part 2), all 72 of them. If you’re a fan of baseball and on a decent Internet connection it’s definitely worth checking out. From shadow punches, to leg lifts and kung fu fighing stances, the strikeout call by an umpire is his time to shine.

They are dramatic, they are entertaining and most off all, it signifies a precious out for a team. Below are my fifteen favourites. Give the page a second to load or Yerrrrrrrrrrrrr Out!

We’ve all been in awkward situations, our lives are full of them. Nobody’s perfect, but how you handle it can turn an awkward moment into a partial win. Below you will see 15 awkward situations and what these people did to try and turn it around. It might not always work but the best you can do is try, and nobody can take that away from you! (They still might laugh though)

Artist ABVH is an animated gif monster! With over 33 pages of animated excellence on his highly active Tumblr page, ABVH is proof that the animated gif culture is alive and well. In the series below, ABVH adds movement to some of Banksy’s most famous artworks. The animations are subtle with much of the image remaining static. This is similar to the cinemagraphs style that has been featured on the site before. Enjoy!

[First spotted on My Modern Met]

When a citizen of the Internet goes above and beyond, a heartfelt congratulatory gif is a great way to show your sincere appreciation. Whether it be a witty retort, constructive feedback, a delightful anecdote, or a useful comment with a credible source, these gifs will help you spread the love. Enjoy! And stay sifty my friends!

Mr. Whaite is a 2D animator and illustrator with an unhealthy obsession for neon signs. He has a wildly popular Tubmlr blog (mrwhaite.tumblr.com), an active Twitter feed (@MrWhaite) and a digital storefront for his non-animated prints and illustrations (RedBubble). In his ongoing quest to bless the Internet with neon goodness Mr. Whaite has created an amazing series of neon sign animated gifs. All of them are posted to his blog and the Sifter highly recommends you check them out!

Below you will find a small sample of his collection of neon sign movie posters as animated gifs. Enjoy!

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an animated gif must be priceless! Below you will find a collection of simple and elegant animations that explain how various things work. From geometry to mechanics and everything in between, these animations help educate and explain how the world around us functions.

Through these animations I hope you will have a greater appreciation for the ingenuity of humans and a newfound respect for the great thinkers and inventors throughout history. Enjoy!

A tablet press is a mechanical device that compresses powder into tablets of uniform size and weight. A press can be used to manufacture tablets of a wide variety of materials, including pharmaceuticals, illicit drugs such as MDMA, cleaning products, and cosmetics. To form a tablet, the granulated material must be metered into a cavity formed by two punches and a die, and then the punches must be pressed together with great force to fuse the material together. [Source: Wikipedia]

The Walschaerts valve gear is a type of valve gear invented by Belgian railway mechanical engineer Egide Walschaerts in 1844 used to regulate the flow of steam to the pistons in Steam Engines. The gear is sometimes named without the final “s”, since it was incorrectly patented under that name. It was extensively used in steam locomotives from the late 19th century until the end of the steam era. [Source: Wikipedia]

In geometry, the tesseract, also called an 8-cell or regular octachoron or cubic prism, is the four-dimensional analog of the cube; the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square. Just as the surface of the cube consists of 6 square faces, the hypersurface of the tesseract consists of 8 cubical cells. [Source: Wikipedia]

A knight’s tour is a sequence of moves of a knight on a chessboard such that the knight visits every square exactly once. The exact number of open tours on an 8×8 chessboard is still unknown.
 
Creating a program to find a knight’s tour is a common problem given to computer science students. Variations of the knight’s tour problem involve chessboards of different sizes than the usual 8 × 8, as well as irregular (non-rectangular) boards. [Source: Wikipedia]

Constant-velocity joints (aka homokinetic or CV joints) allow a drive shaft to transmit power through a variable angle, at constant rotational speed, without an appreciable increase in friction or play. They are mainly used in front wheel drive and all wheel drive cars. Rear wheel drive cars with independent rear suspension typically use CV joints at the ends of the rear axle halfshafts, and increasingly use them on the propshafts. [Source: Wikipedia]

In video games, strafing is the technique of moving the player’s character from side to side, rather than forward and backward. Circle strafing is the technique of moving around a target in a circle while facing it. Circle strafing allows a player to fire continuously at an opponent while dodging counterattacks. By rapidly circling the opponent, the player evades the opponent’s sights. [Source: Wikipedia]

The radial engine is a reciprocating type internal combustion engine configuration in which the cylinders point outward from a central crankshaft like the spokes of a wheel. It resembles a stylized star when viewed from the front, and is called a “star engine” (German Sternmotor) in some languages. The radial configuration was very commonly used in aircraft engines before turbine engines became predominant. [Source: Wikipedia]

The Geneva drive or Maltese cross is a gear mechanism that translates a continuous rotation into an intermittent rotary motion. The rotating drive wheel has a pin that reaches into a slot of the driven wheel advancing it by one step. The drive wheel also has a raised circular blocking disc that locks the driven wheel in position between steps.
 
The name derives from the device’s earliest application in mechanical watches, Switzerland and Geneva being an important center of watchmaking. Another application of the Geneva drive is in movie projectors: the film does not run continuously through the projector. Instead, the film is advanced frame by frame, each frame standing still in front of the lens for 1/24 of a second (and being exposed twice in that time, resulting in a frequency of 48 Hz). This intermittent motion is achieved using a Geneva drive. [Source: Wikipedia]

The Spinning Dancer is a kinetic, bistable optical illusion resembling a pirouetting female dancer. Some observers initially see the figure as spinning clockwise and some counterclockwise. Additionally, some may see the figure suddenly spin in the opposite direction. The illusion derives from an inherent ambiguity from the lack of visual cues for depth. [Source: Wikipedia]

A hypotrochoid is a roulette traced by a point attached to a circle of radius r rolling around the inside of a fixed circle of radius R, where the point is a distance d from the center of the interior circle. [Source: Wikipedia]

A Stirling engine is a heat engine operating by cyclic compression and expansion of air or other gas, the working fluid, at different temperature levels such that there is a net conversion of heat energy to mechanical work. Or more specifically, a closed-cycle regenerative heat engine with a permanently gaseous working fluid, where closed-cycle is defined as a thermodynamic system in which the working fluid is permanently contained within the system, and regenerative describes the use of a specific type of internal heat exchanger and thermal store, known as the regenerator. It is the inclusion of a regenerator that differentiates the Stirling engine from other closed cycle hot air engines. [Source: Wikipedia]

The Wankel engine is a type of internal combustion engine using an eccentric rotary design to convert pressure into a rotating motion instead of using reciprocating pistons. Its four-stroke cycle takes place in a space between the inside of an oval-like epitrochoid-shaped housing and a rotor that is similar in shape to a Reuleaux triangle but with sides that are somewhat flatter. The very compact Wankel engine delivers smooth high-rpm power. It is commonly called a rotary engine, though this name applies also to other completely different designs.
 
The engine was invented by German engineer Felix Wankel. He received his first patent for the engine in 1929, began development in the early 1950s at NSU, completing a working prototype in 1957. NSU then licensed the concept to companies around the world, which have continued to improve the design. It is the only internal combustion engine invented in the twentieth century to go into production.
 
Thanks to their compact design, Wankel rotary engines have been installed in a variety of vehicles and devices including automobiles, motorcycles, racers, aircraft, go-karts, jet skis, snowmobiles, chain saws, and auxiliary power units. [Source: Wikipedia]

The sun and planet gear (also called the planet and sun gear) was a method of converting reciprocal motion to rotary motion and was utilised in a reciprocating steam engine. It was invented by the Scottish engineer William Murdoch, an employee of Boulton and Watt, but was patented by James Watt in October 1781. It was invented to bypass the patent on the crank, held by James Pickard. It played an important part in the development of devices for rotation in the Industrial Revolution. [Source: Wikipedia]

Yesterday, Redditor iR3C0N7 posted a perfectly timed graphic overlay of former Liverpool football manager Rafael Benitez. Like most sports broadcasts, graphic overlays are used to show statistics, game information and player names.

In the comment section, other Redditors contributed more examples of perfectly timed graphic overlays in sports. Below you will find the top 5. If you know of any other perfectly timed overlays, please let us know in the comments!

[via iR3C0N7, Plagiarismo, barf314, duck867, PeruTheGnar]

Dain Fagerholm aka “DAiN 8)” aka “I>/-|i/\/8)” is an artist currently living in Seattle, Washington. Dain works mostly with ink pens and colour dye markers and started making what he calls ‘stereographic gifs’ of his drawings in February of 2012. He was most recently award the ‘Most Mesmerizing [GIF] or [PIC] of 2012‘ by r/WoahDude.

When Dain’s not on Tumblr or drawing, he’s a volunteer dog walker at the Progressive Animal Welfare Society and the Seattle Humane Society. Apparently he also likes to tattoo himself.

Below you will find a small collection of hand drawn 3D gifs along with links to Dain’s various online profiles where he is quite active.

For the first time in nearly four years of running this site I will be travelling with limited access to Internet (I shuddered just typing that). Thus I am unable to provide the typical Shirk Report you’ve enjoyed for the past 196 weeks. In lieu, I have created a special one-time animated gif edition. If you’re a fan of the shirk you know my penchant for animated gifs. So instead of articles and videos, I present 50 hilarious animated gifs that will hopefully add a little enjoyment to your lazy Friday.

Enjoy! And stay sifty my friends :)

50 ANIMATED GIFS

1. Let’s get started
2. How ice cream sandwiches are made
3. Full-stop
4. Bridge troll
5. Slick boarding
6. Double domino domination
7. No man can carry that many bags
8. Look at those elbows
9. My kind of parliament
10. A classic
11. Gold medal vaults, 54 years apart
12. That was unexpected
13. Missed connection
14. Descended
15. Racist?
16. Vaulted
17. pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew
18. Dwight Howard
19. Look to the cookie
20. It’s spreading
21. Work it out
22. Dominated
23. Trippy
24. Deception
25. Bieber remix
26. Counting is an art
27. An art I tell you!
28. The only way to get in bed
29. Oh you don’t care for all these gifs?
30. Daaaaaaaaaamn!
31. Japan has awesome ideas for game shows
32. Smoke rings
33. Iced
34. Slow motion, multiple angles
35. Team defense at its finest
36. Metallurgy
37. Dogs don’t get escalators
38. Swag
39. Swaggier
40. Jazz hands * infinity
41. Boo.
42. Ninja cat
43. Hill cimbing
44. Launching humvees
45. Mildly impressive
46. Kid can roll
47. Base humor
48. Did not see that coming
49. This is facial distortion. Your eyes deceive you
50. And there you have it

Nathan Pyle is an artist and illustrator that has been living in New York City for the past 4.5 years. During that period he has learned much about how things work in one of the world’s greatest cities.

In a new series entitled, NYC Basic Tips and Etiquette, Pyle has created a guide for newcomers in the form of illustrated animated gifs.

Posted yesterday to Reddit, the post quickly reached the front page. Nathan hopes to turn the series into book form or possibly even as a calendar or web series. Whatever happens, the Sifter looks forward to seeing more from this series. Keep up to date with Nathan’s artwork at the links below.

In this incredible photo/animated gif/time-lapse video (the latter two can be seen below), we see a brilliant moonrise over Los Angeles, California. The footage was captured by Dan Marker-Moore, a motion designer and artist from LA. The time sliced image above is a collage of 11 photos taken over 27 minutes and 59 seconds.

The video below was shot with on a OMD EM5 m/43 camera and a 100mm lens.

For more visual deliciousness, be sure to check out Dan on tumblr and Instagram.

Fighting games have always been a mainstay in video game culture. From the earliest arcade and console games, the typically 2-dimensional format has endured through the years.

Following up from a popular 4chan thread a few months back (on /v/ and /vr/), Redditor RudeBootie (who was the same person that originally posted them to 4chan) uploaded an epic collection of 125 fighting game backgrounds as animated gifs to Imgur.

Games included in this unbelievable collection are: Vampire Savior, Street Fighter 2: Super Turbo, Street Fighter: Alpha 3, Street Fighter: Third Strike, The Art of Fighting, Last Blade, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, King of Fighters and Samurai Showdown.

With your help, it would be great to label and identify as many of the levels as possible. If you know the game/level one of the backgrounds below is from, please advise in the comment section! And be sure to visit Imgur for the complete 125-picture gallery.

[via RudeBootie]

Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut and the first Canadian to walk in space. On December 21, 2012, the former Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot became the first Canadian to command the ISS (Expedition 35). Until his departure on May 12, 2013, Hadfield was incredibly active on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, raising awareness for the space program and engaging audiences worldwide.

Through a fascinating series of videos posted on the Canadian Space Agency YouTube page, Hadfield answered questions and showed the world what life in space is like.

Last week, Imgur user TozzaG created an album of animated gifs that captured some of Hadfield’s most viral demonstrations. The album was then reposted to Reddit by preggit. Below you will find the album along with a link to each individual video, enjoy!

[TozzaG on Imgur via preggit on Reddit]

Tech Noir is a Dutch artist who has been creating living movie stills since November 2011. All 125+ of his works can be found on technoir.nl. The blog title comes from a movie genre by the same name, describing Sci-Fi flicks filmed in the style of film noir.

The living movie stills are created using After Effects and Photoshop. You can find a brief tutorial on how to create your own here.

[via a_deneb]

‘SOMETIMES TO CREATE, ONE MUST FIRST DESTROY.’

‘THE JOKER PLANNED TO BE CAUGHT.’

‘LOS ANGELES NOVEMBER, 2019’

‘I’M TRYING TO FREE YOUR MIND, NEO. BUT I CAN ONLY SHOW YOU THE DOOR. YOU’RE THE ONE THAT HAS TO WALK THROUGH IT.’

‘ALRIGHT. HEY. ALRIGHT. GOOD JOB, GUYS. LET’S JUST NOT COME IN TOMORROW. LET’S JUST TAKE A DAY. HAVE YOU EVER TRIED SHAWARMA? THERE’S A SHAWARMA JOINT ABOUT TWO BLOCKS FROM HERE. I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS, BUT I WANNA TRY IT.’

‘THE CITY LOOKS SO PEACEFUL FROM UP HERE. … ANYTHING IS PEACEFUL FROM ONE THOUSAND, THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-THREE FEET.’

‘I FEEL LIKE I CAN TAKE OUT THE WORLD.’

‘THE YEARS SPENT IN ISOLATION HAVE NOT EQUIPPED HIM WITH THE TOOLS NECESSARY TO JUDGE RIGHT FROM WRONG. HE’S HAD NO CONTEXT. HE’S BEEN COMPLETELY WITHOUT GUIDANCE. FURTHERMORE, HIS WORK – THE GARDEN SCULPTURES, HAIRSTYLES AND SO FORTH – INDICATE THAT HE’S A HIGHLY IMAGINATIVE… UH… CHARACTER. IT SEEMS CLEAR THAT HIS AWARENESS OF WHAT WE CALL REALITY IS RADICALLY UNDERDEVELOPED.’

‘THERE’S A WHOLE OCEAN OF OIL UNDER OUR FEET! NO ONE CAN GET AT IT EXCEPT FOR ME!’

‘ARE YOU GOING TO KILL ME NOW? … I KILLED YOU 10 MINUTES AGO.’

‘THE PILLS COME FROM A GIRLFRIEND WHO’S A SHRINK, SHE TRIED TO ANALYZE ME ONCE BUT SHE GOT TOO SCARED’.

‘I AM THE GATEKEEPER!’

“GO-GO, I KNOW YOU FEEL YOU MUST PROTECT YOUR MISTRESS. BUT I BEG YOU, WALK AWAY.”

‘HI MILTON. WHAT’S HAPPENING? I’M GONNA HAVE TO ASK YOU TO GO AHEAD AND MOVE YOUR DESK AGAIN.’

‘OKAY, THIS IS WHERE I DON’T WANT TO BE.’

Anthony Howe is an American artist that has been making suspended and freestanding kinetic sculptures for the last 17 years. Howe’s artwork is designed to respond to the exterior natural environment of wind and light.

In his artist statement, Howe explains:

“I attempt, with an economy of means, to construct objects whose visual references range from lo-tech sci-fi paraphernalia to microbiological or astronomical models.
 
Utilizing primarily stainless steel armatures that are driven either by hammered curvilinear shapes or flat fiberglass covered discs, I hope the pieces assume a spare, linear elegance when conditions are still, mutating to raucous animation when the wind picks up.
 
Multiple axis finely balanced forms, both symmetrical and asymmetrical, conspire to create a visually satisfying three-dimensional harmony. Interior pieces include suspended gear motor and air driven wire armatures stretched with fiberglass, similar wall mounted pieces, as well as glass assemblages.”

You can find many more examples of Howe’s fascinating work on his official website HOWEART.NET. Below you will find a small sample of the Sifter’s personal favourites. I also created animated gifs and embedded videos to demonstrate the movement and light each sculpture embraces.

[via Colossal]

After a teaching career that spanned 40 years (1973-2012), Dale Irby, 63, has left behind a legacy of yearbook photos in which he is wearing the exact same outfit year after year. According to the Dallas Morning News it began as an accident:

“I was so embarrassed when I got the school pictures back that second year and realized I had worn the very same thing as the first year,” said Dale, 63. But his wife, Cathy, dared him to do it a third year. Then Dale thought five would be funny. “After five pictures,” he said, “it was like: ‘Why stop?’”

Dale was a physical education teacher at Titche Elemntary in the Pleasant Grove area of Dallas. Aside from a great sense of humour, Irby was a well-respected teacher and even had the gymnasium named in his honour. Let’s give a hand to Dale and countless other amazing teachers around the world!
 
[Dallas Mornings News via Laughing Squid]

A fore-edge painting is a technique of painting on the edges of the pages of a book. The artwork can only be seen when the pages are fanned, as seen in the animation below. When the book is closed, you don’t see the image because it is hidden by the gilding (i.e., the gold leaf applied to the edges of the page).

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, fore-edge paintings first arose during the European Middle Ages but came to prominence during the mid-17th century to the late 19th century. Anne C. Bromer for the Boston Public Library writes, “Most fore-edge painters working for binding firms did not sign their work, which explains why it is difficult to pinpoint and date the hidden paintings.”

Thanks to the generous gifts from Anne and David Bromer and Albert H. Wiggin, the Boston Public Library holds one of the finest collections of fore-edge paintings in the United States. Most of the collection has been put online for the world to enjoy and features more than 200 high-resolution images; complete with additional videos, articles and information.

The University of Iowa and Colossal recently featured a few fore-edge paintings with animated gifs that can also be seen below.