So once upon a time I did this.
I asked my audience what they thought I was doing,
and no one really guessed correctly.
What I was doing in that clip was turning myself into a GIF
for my Instagram Stories.
Ever since Elise the GIF debuted on Instagram Stories,
this is probably the number one question I've received: Elise,
how did you turn yourself into a GIF?
And initially I created a GIF version of myself just for fun.
I didn't really think it would be all that useful,
but ever since I created a GIF version of myself, boy,
I am finding it very useful just to jazz up my Instagram Stories,
I've even put myself into posts on my feed as a GIF.
I even use myself in ads as a GIF.
So overall I'm really happy I turned myself into a GIF.
That's what I'm going to show you in today's video,
how you can turn yourself into a GIF for free for your Instagram
Stories.
And stay tuned until the end where I'm going to share how the GIFs that you
create of yourself for your Stories can actually serve as a mini
ad for your business. I'm Elise Darma,
and I've taught thousands of entrepreneurs, freelancers,
and Creators like yourself how to use Instagram to grow your business.
And today I'm showing you how to turn yourself into a GIF for your
Instagram Stories. Step one is planning.
What are the movements that you want to record yourself doing that you're going
to find really useful for your Stories? I've done this once before.
And what I find really useful are a few emotions and
motions. Things like thinking, that one's been pretty good.
Of course, if you have the Swipe Up feature that one's really good,
you can do this, or you can even point up and look up.
There's also clapping. There's also dancing.
There is also hand hearts,
which is one that I wish I had done the first time around.
So go ahead and look at the GIFs that you've used in the past, in your archive,
on your Instagram Stories.
Look at the GIFs that people are using and make a list of all the movements that
you want to record. Believe me, I wish I had done this because it's super handy,
so you don't forget anything that you need to record.
Next step is to record yourself making the movements.
So I have used my phone for this,
but I do recommend a high definition camera like the one that I'm filming on
right now, it's the Canon G7X.
And so my GIFs that are published right now are from this camera.
We just found that it produced a better quality.
So if you can use the high quality camera, great. If not,
this will do just fine. And for demonstration purposes,
I'm going to use my iPhone right now. Okay. So I'm standing up,
I actually have my phone camera positioned right underneath this camera and I'm
just going to fill myself doing a motion just so you can see really quickly what
it is.
Okay. So the classic swipe up motion.
I just filmed four seconds of it.
Now that it's filmed on my phone,
we're actually going to go to my desktop computer.
I'm going to pull the file off of my phone and bring it into a
program that makes all this magic happen.
Here we are on my desktop and in my downloads folder is the clip that I
just filmed on my phone.
And right here is the tool that you will use to remove the
background of your video whenever you film. So again,
make sure you're in front of a light and your clip is as clear as possible
because you're just going to come here. You're going to upload the clip.
And by the way,
I had to convert my .mov file to an .MP4 file.
So I found that the .MP4 worked better with this program.
So I just found a free tool that did that online. So here we are,
it's uploading my clip that I just filmed and you can see it's done a pretty
good job of removing the background. Oh, my hand went,
let's see if we can capture that. Let's give it a few minutes. Okay.
So I can see that my hand is being cut off.
So that would tell me to go back to my original video clip and actually trim
that first part off 'cause I don't see a trim tool with this one.
Um,
so it looks like you need to upload your clip in full as good as it's going to
be. 'Cause right now my only options are to view the original,
look at the transparent, there's a video background option,
colored options as well. Or you can add an image. Okay?
So we're just going to do transparent, 'cause that's the purpose.
And here I can see that I can download it as a GIF,
an animated PNG or single frames. So in this case we want to GIF.
And because it's a free tool, there is going to be a watermark,
but of course there's the pro option where you can remove the Unscreen
watermark. Okay. So now that it's downloaded, let's say it's perfect.
And this is what we want to upload.
Now we're going to go to giphy.com and you're going to want to create an
account.
So here I am in my agency account on Giphy and you can actually see all the
prior GIFs that we've uploaded.
So this is how I'm pulling them into my Instagram Stories.
So let's go to upload and submit
our most recent GIF that we just created. Here. It is.
You can see it right there.
And there we go. So it's not perfect, but there's the GIF.
Now here's where you're going to enter your source URL.
So it could be EliseDarma.com. And this is where you're going to tag it.
Tags are important.
This is where you want to use keywords that you are going to use,
to find your own GIF,
but you also want to use keywords that other people might be typing in
to perhaps use your GIF as well. So girl,
woman, um, you could even do swipe up girl for example,
I've seen that one, uh, Jean jacket,
um, see more, watch more,
tap more. So tags are really important for you to find your GIF. So for me,
I just type in Elise Darma,
and it's also a really great way for you to almost be an ad
for other people when they are searching for key terms as well. All right?
So once you're finished all your tags, you're going to give your GIF a rating.
Then you can choose whether it's public or not.
So you want to leave public on.
And then you're going to upload to Giphy.
And there you have it. The upload is complete.
It's now officially in the Giphy account for me and
for others to ultimately search for and find on Instagram.
I do find that when you upload to Giphy,
it takes 12-24 hours to actually see your Instagram account.
So the one I just uploaded is going to need some time,
but I'll check back in a couple hours and then I will find that GIF for me to be
able to use.
There you have it.
That's how you turn yourself into a GIF for your Instagram Stories.
Now, if you're watching this thinking, well, that's great. It looks fun,
but what is the point of turning myself into a GIF for my Stories,
if I don't even know how to use my Stories to grow my business?
That is a very good question, my friend, and for you, I have a solution.
It's called Story Vault.
Story Vault is my answer to your question of,
what do I post to my Stories so that it actually makes a difference?
Story Vault is 800 ideas for your Stories,
all categorized by what your business needs the most right now,
whether that is visibility, engagement, leads, or sales.
Plus I have 16 free Instagram Story prompts for you
that you can download and check out even before you join Story Vault,
I'll leave the link for the 16 free prompts right below this video.
To ease and revenue. I'll see you in the next video.
Thanks for watching this demo on how to GIF-ify your Instagram Stories.
If you've made it this far,
please subscribe to my channel so that you don't miss any future trainings just
like I like this one.