Here at the Daily Dot, we swap GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you in. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.
When photographer Nikola Pavlinovic looks up at the night sky, he doesn’t just see a bright moon. He sees a person smoking a cigarette, alone, and sad that in 40 years, no one has come to visit.
That’s the moon depicted in Pavlinovic’s Tumblr GIFs, a series of animations inspired by the three loves in his life.
“I’ve just always enjoyed drawing and sketching from a young age, just like my mother,” Pavlinovic, 21, told the Daily Dot. “Ever since I got into photography a couple years ago, I couldn’t think of a better way to combine my two favourite hobbies together other than in an animation.”
Pavlinovic lives in Auckland, New Zealand, where street art has inspired him artistically. Over the last two years Pavlinovic has created more than a dozen original GIFs by drawing fine white lines over original photos. (Nearly every single GIF has collected more than 10,000 notes.) It’s a style of animation popularized on Tumblr, a place where Pavlinovic has also found much inspiration.
“I haven’t always been interested in photography. I only really got into it after buying my first camera purely for study purposes while I was at university,” Pavlinovic said. “Tumblr has helped me find inspiration and motivation when I can’t find it anywhere else. Plus it’s my happy place where my parents can’t bother me.”
Illustration by Nikola Pavlinovic/Tumblr
