Daniel Boud’s Splendour GIFs Are Just About The Greatest

Every year, Sydney photographer Daniel Boud and our friends at FasterLouder put together a pretty amazing gallery from their backstage studio at Splendour In The Grass.

This year they upstaged themselves, and made you some ‘Moving Portraits‘: exclusive animated GIFs of all your favourites, including The National, Empire Of The Sun, James Blake, Sarah Blasko, Daughter, Chet Faker, Flume, Mumford And Sons, and a whole lot more.

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These are so great! How did you make them?

Daniel Boud: FasterLouder had a tent (a nice big clean tent — not the camping variety) backstage, where the artists came to to get their portrait taken. I had a white wall and lights set up in there, but I preferred to go outside as much as possible, to show off the site a bit more.

The National

Somewhat out of my comfort zone, I was shooting video instead of stills. I wanted the nice smooth motion of video over the jerkiness that stills would’ve given me for animating the GIF. I shot a minute or two worth of footage of the artist, and then had to trim that down to just a couple of seconds in most cases. GIFs have very poor file compression, so you really have to cut back and simplify to ensure the file size doesn’t get out of control.

In terms of hardware and software, I shot the footage on my Canon 5D III, trimmed the clips in Quicktime Pro, added a subtle colour grade in Lightroom, and then did the animating in Photoshop.

Did you come up with the concepts, or did the bands help?

DB: I came up with most of the concepts, along with the help of the FasterLouder team.

I would have loved the bands to bring their own ideas but usually nothing comes to them on the spot and they prefer to be told what to do.

Chet Faker

Which was the most fun?

DB: In terms of fun people to meet, who got into the spirit of things, I’d say Deap Valley, Ms Mr and Darwin Deez were my favourites. They had a great positive attitude and were happy to goof around and indulge my odd requests. Every year at Splendour I tend to walk away with a new band crush, and Deap Valley were that for me this year.

Deap Valley

Creatively, I think my favourites are The National and James Blake. They were two artists I really wanted to ensure had a good GIF, and I had a very clear picture in my head of what I wanted. They understood it quickly, and it all came together just as I had hoped.

Which was the hardest?

DB: Of Monsters And Men was the last shoot of a fairly punishing three-day schedule. I was told they’d cancelled and was somewhat relieved, and began packing up before being told it was back on. I set up and lit quite an elaborate outdoor scene for them, moving a table and several potted palm trees. Then, just as they were arriving, a sudden rainstorm blew in, putting an end to that outdoor idea. They’re on a tight schedule, so I had to quickly reconfigure indoors.

The band were perfectly nice, but it just felt like a disappointingly mediocre option for them.

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To check out the rest of Daniel Boud’s amazing GIFery, head to FasterLouder.com.

Batch One: Architecture In Helsinki, Airbourne, Boy & Bear, Chet Faker, Clairy Browne & The Bangin’ Rackettes, Cloud Control, Darwin Deez, Daughter, Dune Rats, Klaxons, MS MR, Mumford and Sons, Robert DeLong, The National, Twinsy, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Vance Joy, Wavves and You Am I.

Batch Two: James Blake, Flume, Of Monsters and Men, FIDLAR, Birds Of Tokyo, Empire Of The Sun, Something For Kate, Palma Violets, Sarah Blasko, Surfer Blood, Jake Buggand, Deap Valley, Jagwar Ma, Passion Pit and more.

To gawk at more of Daniel Boud’s work, visit boudist.com.