Here at the Daily Dot, we have an unofficial tradition of sharing GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you into the circle. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.
Have you ever worked on something for hours, meticulously planning each part of a project, only to realize in the end it was all wrong?
That was the case with “camouflage,” a surreal GIF animation series from 20-something-year-old Zach.
“I went into it thinking that I wanted to make a silhouette using parallel lines that blended in closely with the background. I thought I’d see if I could make something that was sort of like an optical illusion and would cause headaches,” Zach, who declined to give his last name, told the Daily Dot. “After about an hour and some deep soul searching, I finally realized that I had I completely failed.”
What took hours to create, took only too seconds to destroy. Zach deleted 18 layers worth of the GIFs, leaving a “set of silhouetted moving lines perpendicular to the horizontal background lines.” And those simple lines were all he needed.
Using that theme, Zach created four surreal GIFs of a man covered in horizontal lines walking against different moving backgrounds. Zach posted the series of images to Tumblr last night, where they collected more than 2,200 notes in five hours. He concluded:
This is getting a better response than anything I’ve done in months.I think probably anyone who spends much time making animations will tell you that it’s agonizing. You walk in a giant circle for an hour and then end up a few inches away from where you started.
