Of all the rooms in her house, the office is where Stephanie Vail feels most at home.

An iMac desktop computer, paired with a giant flatscreen monitor, is the room's centrepiece, the anchor of her New Hampshire work station.

Since April 15, when the puck dropped on the NHL playoffs, Vail has spent more than 30 hours staring at that giant monitor and two other smaller screens.

She mines the most shareable bits of TV broadcasts and converts them into GIF files -- short for Graphics Interchange Format but better explained as a video clip on loop -- which she posts to Twitter under the handle “@myregularface”.

A relative unknown this time last year, Vail has carved out a notable niche after taking up the hobby two Christmases ago. With an ever-growing audience of nearly 13,000 Twitter followers, she’s quickly become an indispensable member of the online hockey community.

“Sometimes I do obsess about it,” Vail said on Thursday during a Skype interview from her Boston Bruins-themed bedroom, “but it can be a lot of fun. It’s second nature.”

This post-season, while still young, has provided Vail, a history major at Southern New Hampshire University, with plenty of A+ material. From traditional highlights, such as goals, saves and hits, to the wacky -- like Erik Karlsson slyly winking during Game 6 of the Senators-Canadiens series -- she covers it all.

“Whenever there’s a play happening near the glass, someone in the crowd is always doing something hilarious,” said Vail, adding that “Mike Babcock is always making hilarious faces, and people love that.”

Save from part-time freelance work for the Boston Globe's Boston.com, the 28-year-old largely is her own brand. She pumps out GIF after GIF, almost in real-time, thanks to some quick fingers and an efficient video-to-GIF process.

With games often overlapping, she’s forgotten to eat dinner “countless times” in the year-and-a-half she’s been at it: “I feel I can’t really let people down at this point,” she said.

Vail is not the lone provider of hockey GIFs, but an argument could be made that she is the quickest and best known hockey-specific GIF-maker out there.

The Nashua, N.H., native and her GIF-making peers have “revolutionized the way we follow games,” said Greg Wyshynski, the editor of Puck Daddy, Yahoo! Sports’ hockey blog.

“What Steph has done is make (viewing game highlights) immediate,” he added. “And not only make it immediate but make it immediate with multiple (camera) angles. Which is nuts.”

Although re-purposing broadcast footage appears like a dicey endeavour, the NHL does not plan on stopping those who create GIFs, according to a league spokesperson.

Vail, whose brother Chris Vail had a cup of coffee in the ECHL and sister is a former Bruins ice girl, is one of a few void-filling content providers to gain notoriety over the past 5-10 years.

Matthew Wuest, who in March lost a battle with cancer, is another example. The salary cap information he provided on CapGeek.com was top-notch and is missed greatly.

Vail’s relevance is underlined by the era we live in. Tech-savvy fans refuse to simply sit on the couch and watch a hockey game with passivity.

Instead, they live it. They tweet knee-jerk reactions, keep tabs on play-by-play data and watch key moments on loop. A second screen – computer, phone, tablet, whatever -- never seems far away.

“She seemed to have this bizarre robot-like ability to watch 85 games at the same time,” Wyshynski said of Vail’s efficiency during a hectic opening round of the playoffs. “It was always really cool how her stuff would come out quickly.”

“She’s been invaluable for me,” added Michael Russo, the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Minnesota Wild beat writer.

When St. Louis Blues forward Steve Ott got up close and personal with the Minnesota bench in Game 4 of their first-round series, Russo turned to Vail’s GIFs to provide clarity. It was a sequence he couldn’t make complete sense of from the press box.

From her home office, staring down that giant monitor, it feels like Vail only stops when the players stop.

“She creates viral content almost every night,” Wyshynski said. “I don’t know how the hell she does it.”

What would we all do without @myregularface??? — Michael Russo (@Russostrib) April 21, 2015

‘DOWN TO A SCIENCE’

By now, with her GIF tally somewhere in the tens of thousands, it's safe to say Stephanie Vail knows what she's doing.

In fact, she insists, her GIF-making process is now “down to a science.”

“I’m not very web-savvy,” Vail said. “I have my one little area of expertise, with the GIFs, but that’s pretty much it.”

With an iMac desktop straight ahead, a MacBook Pro laptop on a stand to her left, as well as a DVR box and flatscreen TV to her right, Vail is bombarded by visuals every hockey night. She's watching at least two games at a time via live TV broadcast and the NHL's GameCentre LIVE streaming service.

Once a clip has been recorded using Quicktime, Vail fires up something called GIF Brewery. She filters it through that app, edits it to her liking and plops on a watermark.

It's not rare for Vail to create two GIFs simultaneously – one from each game, hands designated to different sequences – and post both clips to Twitter within a minute.

And voila, viral content is ready to go. To be shared at a rabid pace.

@myregularface's personal favourites from the 2014-15 playoffs: