I always thought those rotating food gifs were funny to use in chats, and every once in a while I’d see a rotating item like an entire Taco Bell restaurant that made me think “wow this has some big comedy potential”.
So I set out to learn how to make these myself. How hard can it be!

It was hard. First, here’s the setup I ended up with:

Rotating table in a lightbox, with auxiliary studio lights.

After acquiring footage, I generally used the following process:

1. Trim footage to proper infinite loop length in premiere pro
2. Crop footage boundaries using adobe express
3. Rotoscope out background in after effects, with lots of manual refinement
4. Import into photoshop as a quicktime video, then use ‘export for web (legacy)’ to save an actual gif, paying lots of attention to the compiler settings

Might look like a short, easy list, but it’s a huge pain when there are so many arduous steps and ways things can go wrong, which you may only notice at the very end.

First experiments:

After adjusting matte selection, rotoscope contrast, studio lighting, and other settings we are returned this beauty:

It’s not perfect, but I got the process down.

Now… time for more.

Made 8/28/23