After going viral with its “Straight Outta Somewhere” meme on social media, Universal Pictures is hoping to strike lightning again ahead of Friday’s release of “Straight Outta Compton.”
The studio has teamed with Giphy on six customized N.W.A-themed GIFs released Aug. 12 to help spread awareness of the music biopic.
While the “Straight Outta Somewhere” meme got fans getting creative on Instagram and Twitter, Giphy COO Adam Leibsohn believes the GIFs will appeal to millennials on a different set of digital platforms.
“By putting content through Giphy, you have a better shot at reaching the most hard-to-reach audiences on the planet,” said Leibsohn. “You can’t buy an ad inside of Facebook Messenger. You can’t buy an ad inside all of the photo editing tools that we integrate into.”
Giphy provides a search engine that contains a vast library of short, silent videos that play in a continuous loop, known as GIFs — many of them draw on the intellectual property of popular movies and TV shows licensed by the company. Among a myriad of messaging platforms where Giphy is available are Facebook Messenger, iMessage and Kik.
“Straight Outta Compton” is not the first studio project to utilize GIFs in social media. The inhouse team of artists, named the Studio at Giphy, has also generated GIFs for the Tony Awards, “Teminator: Genysis,” “A Million Ways to Die in the West” and “Game of Thrones.”
Giphy artistic director Dani Newman said that she worked with Universal to showcase all of the different artists and styles at their disposal.
“In general, the way that we tend to work with people is giving them a taste of the specific styles of GIF artists that we have on the site,” said Newman. “Universal was so cool and open-minded about the direction that we got a ton of different types of content back.”
Ultimately, Giphy commissioned six GIF artists to make the original creations. Artist Hateplow made the below GIF, which shows accessories appearing and disappearing that are most notably associated with the the iconic West Coast rap group.
These #NWA inspired GIFs are Straight Outta the Internet: http://t.co/kYtNNKcnu6 @ComptonMovie #StraightOuttaCompton pic.twitter.com/XcaTrx8buE
— GIPHY (@GIPHY) August 12, 2015
Another GIF artist, Bad Codec, described his GIF as a repurposing of N.W.A’s debut studio album. “This is my remix of the classic ‘Straight Outta Compton’ album cover. Now N.W.A are knockin’ GIFs out the box, daily, yo weekly, monthly and yearly until them Internet nerds see clearly.”
Leibsohn said there are more partnerships within the film industry for Giphy. An announcement about its new marketing tools will be made in the coming weeks.
Check out GIF art from the remaining Giphy artists below.
Douglas Schatz
Penelope Gazin
Kolotusha
Clay Rodery
