Science GIFs

When you hear GIF you probably imagine all the funny scenes from movies or pop culture, but they can be helpful in science as well. How you might ask? Well GIFs will play on any operating system with any presentation program. Throughout graduate school I was always worried about putting in videos of time lapse imaging in case they wouldn't play, so I just stuck with frames of the most important points from my experiments. This can leave a lot to be desired and someone in the audience might notice something that you don't with the full video. The solution is to create a GIF with your time lapse images and then it will ALWAYS play for you. Check out my dancing round worm in GIF format.

I use photoshop to create mine, but there are online GIF creators that can be utilized, too. A good demo can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtar5T13dt8

The final thing to remember is that the resulting GIF will not be as high quality as the original set of images. It will work fine on projectors or sending preliminary data to a colleague. Do not do any analysis off this GIF. Hope this helps relieve at least one anxiety about giving talks!