Gifpop

Unhappy leaving animated GIFs relegated to the Internet, a duo from Brooklyn, N.Y., wants to turn them into coaster-sized cards that play when you angle them back and forth.

You might have seen something similar on souvenir postcards or movie posters, but designers Rachel Binx and Sha Hwang who launched a new Kickstarter project called Gifpop!, see the 70-some-odd-year-old lenticular film technology as a business opportunity.

The project, which has already raised more than twice its minimum goal of $5,000, aims to turn GIFs as well as videos from Vine and Instagram into printed cards that can play back "around" 10 frames of any animation. Binx and Hwang say they're planning to use the money not just to set up the production of said products, but also a site that will let users upload that content and get it printed out to different sizes of cards.

Part of that plan also involves offering up a place for GIF artists to hawk their wares on the Gifpop site, and the pair is giving some early backers copies of some of those designs.

"Gifpop is a product, but it is also a provocation," the pair says. "We want to explore and build new avenues for digital artists to make a living, and we want to do this in public."

This isn't the first such project to turn GIFs into physical keepsakes. Back in 2007, Motionbox (which was bought up by HP's Snapfish and later shut down) turned user videos into flipbooks for $8.99. An unrelated DIY version of that idea remains through GIFprint, which turns animated GIFs into printable PDFs that can be converted (by hand) into flipbooks. There was also the 2011 "Physical GIF" Kickstarter project that aimed to do the same thing using laser-cut zoetropes. And not to be outdone, there's also the GIF-TY, a concept product that would not only capture 1 to 5 second video clips, but also turn them into a paper flipbook.

Of course none of those held the potential to double as a coaster, an unadvertised (and likely unadvised) feature of this particular project.

Here's the pitch video:

(via The Atlantic)

Update on 10/24: Added to the list of similar projects is Instawink, which lets you create a similar, coaster-sized lenticular print for $5.99. The service works with standard uploads, or from media on Facebook and Instagram.