GIF-making with Scorpion Dagger

I was blessed with the opportunity to be mentored by artist James Kerr, a.k.a. Scorpion Dagger, for 4 days in March. James’ internet art fame began in 2012 when he made a GIF a day for a year. His GIFs use the characters and settings of Renaissance paintings (mostly from the digitized archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Library of Congress) to create hilarious scenarios of them in every day situations. Here are a few of my favourites, but given that he is so prolific, you really need to just spend some time going through his work, it will be time well spent and if you don’t find yourself laughing your ass off, you might be dead inside. Also check this one out with the sound.

He is a featured GIPHY artist and a super interesting human who taught me everything I know about frame animation. While he was kind enough to host me in his studio over 4 cold Montreal days, we talked GIFs, image archives, internet art, no-background art, ownership/authorship in the context of collage and all kinds of hands on tips and tricks for making GIFs, video-loops and cinemagraphs (in this case referring to a mixture of video and still image like the Night Hawks in Neon GIF at the top of this page) in Photoshop and After Effects. His straight forward down to earth and playful nature meant that I got so much important knowledge about not only how to make these things, but how to file them in ways that don’t make my computer have a nervous breakdown.

Before going to Montreal, I was making all of my GIFs from still images run through a GIF generator and they looked pretty broke down (and not in the broke down way that I like). After/during my time working with him I made GIFs, and riffs on those same GIFs, like the ones below. Thank you James!!