Gastaloops

A 100 days looping gif project

It started as a small project, just to try a set up in After Effects.
But it grew and probably outgrown out of my best expectations.

Great things came thanks to this project!

Here are my Gastaloops, a 100 daily project, one looping animated gif every day.

concept.

Browsing on internet I found a few people that are keeping themselves busy with personal projects on a daily basis. Every day they’re able to post something online.

Looking at them I always thought I couldn’t make it: too busy with my daily job in the studio, too busy at home with my family.
But I tried.

I just had to work against the clock

limits.

In order to fuel the creativity, I wanted to limit myself. Limits always work great with my mindset: playing between boundaries makes me feel more comfortable and relaxes me.

I started setting the palette. Just three colours. I picked a red, an off white and a black. But in order to choose the actual colours I took codes easy to remember, day after day.

So the white is R255 B255 G230, the red is R255 B100 G100 and the black is black, simply enough.

Every gif had to be optimised for Dribbble, so the resolution had to be 800×600.

In order to keep the size down, I chose to use just 50 frames and to have it looping.

freedom.

Having set all these technical limits, I also wanted to be free to create whatever I wanted. Ultimately, I know I had to create one gif everyday in about 1 hour, so I wanted to set up one last rule that would have allowed me not to be stuck, by any means, failing my project.

The last rule is not to have any rule about the tools used or the style created.

Every gif could be done in a 3d program, in After Effects, Photoshop, hand drawn, shot, Houdini, Real Flow, particles or fluid simulations, whatever.

A tool is just a tool and it shouldn’t matter what you use when you create something.

Also, sometimes is even more interesting creating an animation stepping out from our comfort zone. And this is what I did in a lot of the gifs.

achievements.

Creating these gifs it’s been an amazing journey. I can remember clearly where I was and what I did that day of my life just looking at every one of those.

Every day I was posting them online on few social networks: dribbble, imgur, facebook and twitter.

After few weeks, the Gastaloops started to get more and more attention.
In total, now, the Gastaloops have been viewed more than a million times just on imgur. And I managed to get interviews and features on some amazing magazines and websites.

Here is a list:

Feature on Fubiz

Interview on Timeout + Block Shot page on Dribbble

Interview on GIF Magazine

Feature on CreativeBoom

Feature on We and the color

Editor’s pick on Mu.zli (17/02/2017)

Feature on Freepik

Feature on InspirationGrid

Interview on Gif Porn with 150K views.

Featured artist on Giphy

Interview and exclusive feature on Wired Italia