Tumblr artist Jack Moon on how making GIFs helps him make sense of the world

The Gypsy Astronaut is a GIFs-only Tumblr with subjects ranging from 1920s silent film to Monty Python to Ghost World to David Bowie to miscellany so obscure it’s impossible to imagine that the source video is even available on YouTube. The hodgepodge is unnerving, but warmly so.

It’s one of my favorite GIFs accounts because the artist who operates it, Jack Moon, doesn’t dwell on what other people will find shareable. He’s only interested in picking apart why he finds a moment or a gesture GIF-able and compelling, and he uses the blog as a space to root around in his brain and pick out themes. I spoke to him about his process for memorializing these moments, how he feels about Tumblr as a creative space, and how to go about finding the weird stuff online that makes you happy.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length

How much time per day do you spend making GIFs?

That’s a difficult one to begin with. Most of them are made at times when I can immerse myself completely. I wake up, begin working on the material until I basically fall asleep from exhaustion with my proverbial boots on. And then it starts all over again the next day as soon as I get up and light up that first cigarette and take that first sip of coffee. It’s a kind of hyper-focus where there are only images, and some background music to keep me going. Time becomes almost non-existent during those periods. It’s tricky in a way because to me the creative process is very much a solitary act and of course, quite often the necessities of life simply get in the way and before I know, it all grinds to a halt and I have to get the whole circus rolling again.

How do you go about picking a moment to GIF? Some of these are of very brief changes in facial expression and very unimpressive movements. They’re beautiful! But it’s not, I think, in keeping with what people usually do with GIFs, which is select something really goofy or attention-grabbing.

Thanks! It’s not easy to judge my own work. To me, they are simply my GIFs and I wouldn’t know how to make them differently. I am a fully certified autistic, so that might be one reason why they can be a bit “different.” My brain has its own deviant way of registering input, especially when it comes to facial expressions. In real life, in real time, they often don’t register at all, so for me GIFs are really the perfect medium to capture these expressions and little mannerisms, to stick them in a loop and shamelessly stare at people in ways that would otherwise get me a slap in the face. Another thing I find there is that a smile isn’t always a smile, a scream not always a scream. One can turn into the other and meanings can change quite rapidly. So much can happen in the course of one wistful gaze. It’s all a bit of a mystery to me, and an interesting thing to play with really: the tranquil and the excited, the cool and the mad, the tantalizing and the loathsome, melancholy and anxiety… all those registers of this lovely human madness we experience day-in, day-out.

I very much rely on feels and intuition and simply look for anything that strikes me as (visually) interesting, anything that’s a bit daft or weird or makes my heart smile or swoon, makes me laugh or go “aww.”

I love the vibe of the page, with these really beautiful famous women and really weird famous men all mixed together. And then like, a lizard or a vintage title card. Can you talk a little bit about how you cultivated your aesthetic, and describe it better than I just did?

There wasn’t a plan or theme at the get-go. The aesthetic came along organically. I started using the material I liked and was watching at the time and the general feel came from that. It’s a reflection of my own interests, drawing from a hundred years or so of pop culture, and not-so-pop culture. I’m probably a bluesy romantic subterranean at heart, with a strong proclivity for anything silly.

Of course, there is some curating involved, but it doesn’t have one defining idea behind it. One thing I love to play with is how they interact with each other. The way the theme is set up, with these columns, having the GIFs side by side, little stories start to surface. They look around, react to what’s happening around them, in the other GIFs, thinking “what’s up with that?” or something along that way. They are all sort of stuck together in this little universe, and as I add more of them, the order changes and so do the relationships.

Why all these classic ‘80s cultural artifacts and then Bettie Page?

Have I been posting that many ‘80s GIFs? Could be. I have been on a bit of a Smiths run lately. I couldn’t find much in their videos, but I really wanted to do something with the lyrics, so I took those and mixed them with this ‘50s holiday footage full of flowers, which worked quite well I think. I’d like to make more of those. Part of this GIF thing is taking things out of context, removing it or placing it in a new one. Maybe that adds to the aesthetic as well, little artifacts from different eras and styles together.

As for Bettie Page… who doesn’t like Bettie Page? Or Marilyn Monroe, Anna Karina, or Carolyn Jones as Morticia Addams? As Tina Belcher would say: “They are smart, strong, sensual women.” I’d like to add ditzy to that list, and playful, with a sadness in the eyes and a sense of sorrow to the story — but at the same time totally bad arse.

Maybe the word is “captivating.” That’s what I look for, rather than things that are attention-grabbing. There’s a subtle yet big difference there, and Bettie Page might just be a very good example of that. It could be just me, but I find there’s this tendency in the world, in media today, to be loud, to shout the hardest without actually saying anything. Everything gets turned into a competition devoid of substance. The other day, as I was looking for GIF-worthy material, I came across this video of a very funny ‘50s burlesque dancer and some strip club owner commented on it, being rather disdainful, saying how far they’ve come in the industry, because it used to be just a few wiggles and now they’re more like athletes. That sums it up quite nicely; it made me cringe. It’s the same with music. I’m into guitars but whenever I go online I have to sift through all these videos of people who seem to view guitar playing as a competition of who can play the fastest. It’s music, not the Olympics. There’s so much more to be found, to be enticed by, in a slight glimpse of a naked ankle, an almost silent whisper, a coy smile or a softly played vibrating note.

Where do you find the source video for your GIFs? For example, how on earth did you come across this?

That particular one comes from the 1940’s Little Lulu cartoons. I’m not sure how I stumbled on it. Ever since I was a kid I’ve always just thought it was fun to rummage through dusty attics, wander through libraries or browse around in thrift stores and the like. Now the libraries are online — they’re sites like YouTube and Internet Archive. I have some special interests and watch a lot of documentaries, and as long as you keep your eyes peeled, there’s always something to click on through. It’s like a never-ending treasure hunt.

Can you walk me through your process, start to finish? What programs / applications do you use?

I’ll try not to get too technical with this; most of the time it’s a rather straightforward affair anyway. I use After Effects to make the basic selections and then switch to good old Photoshop to make the actual GIF. The first is really handy because it lets me get down to the individual frames. GIFs being loops and all, the in and out points are as defining as everything in between. It’s a matter of making the cuts match the action, to get the flow and rhythm right. It’s a bit like sampling music: you have to follow the natural beat of the movement. One thing about making these kinds of GIFs, is that you can’t always get what you want, but sometimes if you look long enough, you find what you need. Besides, sometimes rocky and shaky rolls just as well.

The standard thing to do in Photoshop is to crop and fiddle with the frame rate and compression settings to meet the Tumblr size limits while keeping the image quality acceptable. It’s also where I might play around with the frames a bit more, to change the speed or time and take out bad “ghost” frames. When I’m feeling fancy, I’ll start retouching or merging individual images, to go for more of a cinemagraph look.

I’ve tried other more dedicated apps, but there’s always some feature missing or things just don’t work the way I want them, too. It’s just too frustrating. I made some notes somewhere to maybe make one myself, tailored to my workflow, but I’m not a developer, so for now I’ll just stick with my rapidly growing out of date versions. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

You’ve been doing this for more than four years! How did this start?

It’s all my girlfriend’s fault really, so I should thank her for that. I was playing around with some animation at the time when for some reason unbeknown to me, she kept telling me to “make GIFs for Tumblr.” So I did, and now there’s no end to the insanity. I wasn’t really on Tumblr before, nor was I that much into GIFs, but it didn’t take long before things caught on. Once people start to share your stuff everywhere, it creates a lot of extra incentive to keep going, and I still enjoy doing it. I was a Tumblr tag editor for a while, and the GIFs did land me some paying jobs over the years; that was really nice. I’d love to do some more actually, so if anyone reads this: hire me!

If it’s just for fun, what do you do for work? What’s your life like offline?

I left home early, studied some philosophy, arts, and math but in the end just graduated as a perpetual drop-out, which means I basically always took whatever job I could find, from selling bras to working in construction and factories. You know… the usual. I did set up the stage for AC/DC once, that was sweet, and every now and then I would find some assignments that were more “arty,” like shooting a documentary, some video editing, graphic design, or press photography. The thing is that being autistic, the social side of things can get a bit much, and promoting myself has never been my forte.

After crashing many couches in the past year I’ve recently moved into this old glass factory right next to the train tracks, in a small town on the hilly outskirts of Brussels, with my two cats, Nietzsche and Socrates. Here I’m setting up shop to churn out fandom lamps and consorts to sell on the Etsys of the world as I devote myself to the GIF-making and animation, hammering out unpublishable stories on my typewriter and playing guitar while trying not to get too caught up in the blues; the rock and roll lifestyle of a starving semi-hermit artist. Next to music, I do find a lot of solace in reading these days, the poetry of Shelley and Byron, Bukowski and Ginsberg, and the books of Kerouac, Fitzgerald and Hunter Thompson.

How much time do you spend on Tumblr? What do you see the space as?

It’s a madhouse, and I mean that in the best of ways. It’s as sordid as it is classy; part art gallery, part museum, part seedy backwater nightclub, part fandom city. It’s a 1920s speakeasy and a 1960s political sit-in. Tumblr’s sort of whatever you want it to be, with cats and plenty of laughs. It’s where the weird ones are, where people go to be whoever they are, or want to be. Or something like that, I suppose. I’m not really that active actually, on a personal blog level. I don’t check my dashboard regularly, but maybe that’s because when I do, it’s easy to get lost in all the swell goodies that are being shared. There’s a lot of inspiration there, and it’s more free in a way, a bit unruly maybe.

I don’t know what it is with me and social media; it’s nice and all, but then again it also has the distinct ability to wake up the grumpy old sod in me. Maybe I don’t really feel the need to express my opinions on everything all the time, or maybe I’m more of a private person who keeps few friends but keeps them close. What I do know is that I really like making these GIFs for my followers, and I very much appreciate all the likes and reblogs, the comments and snippets of fan mail; those always brighten my day. So if you excuse me, I’ll go and make some more now; it’s starting to itch.