Get a Blockbuster and a free toy in Matt Partridge’s Giphy Arts films

The commission for Giphy Arts was simple: deliver a 30-second short that can be turned into a whole bunch of gifs. Matt Partridge, who has been working in animation for over eighteen years, reached out to Giphy with the hope of collaborating on something back in August 2022 – but he’d actually been uploading gifs for people to use for much longer. “There’s something incredibly satisfying about making something knowing that people could be sending them to their friends, family or work colleagues as a shorthand for what they’re up to or how they’re feeling,” says Matt.

Most people know Giphy for this very short format (the platform recommends gifs are no longer than six seconds, the same length Vine used to be). But Giphy also commissions longer 30-second films, as well as stickers and campaigns by artists through Giphy Arts. This is how Matt landed a gig to create two short Giphy films. In them, he revives old-school kiddie animation and places it in a fresh context, for attention spans that are shorter than ever before.

“Shows like Nickelodeon’s Rocko’s Modern Life or Rugrats all had this cute, but kind of wonky and gross edge to the design,” says Matt. This is the style Matt was shooting for (and is his typical animation signature). Both films also look to childhood relics for their stories. Best Day Ever!, the first short Matt produced for Giphy, follows a youngster finding a free toy in a dusty box of cereal; the second, Movie Night!, is set in a video rental store.

Matt does a lot to tie the films to days gone past with not a lot of runtime to play with. Old commercials for cereals or retailers like Toys R Us provided a helpful reference when it came to pace. “They were all around 30 seconds in length, but still managed to tell a short story in each commercial,” says Matt. “They all had these really big dynamic camera movements in them, so I wanted to try and emulate that.”

But this is no straight copy-and-paste job. There are elements here you wouldn’t find in a Cow and Chicken or Hey Arnold!, such as well-tuned colour. The design of Movie Night! is composed of a limited colour palette, but Matt still manages to simulate the specific strip lighting of a Blockbuster. “As Movie Night! is set at night, it really lent itself to playing with light and shadow. There was always something mad about video stores. With all their strip lights, neon signs, freezers units and rows and rows of film titles, they were like really seedy libraries.”

In the near future, Matt plans to create another film to make it a trilogy with Giphy, once more looking at the things we used to do. “I’m hoping if I get to make another one I can jump ahead slightly, I think there’s some fun to be had with the rise of illegal download sites like Limewire and BitTorrent.” With gifs themselves threatening to fade into obscurity, it’s interesting to see how the platform is keeping the media alive through fresh voices, like Matt’s.