The National World War I Museum and Memorial recently launched a collection of approx 500 gif images which document a less dramatic and lighter side of the First World War. The animated photos bring back to the eyes of the beholder the moments of a normal life of the soldiers, showing them while they have fun dancing, playing, joking and playing. In Giphy database, in which the gifs are accessible to users, you can see cooks, nurses, pilots and children in military clothes, shot in scenes of everyday reality, sometimes intent on eating, drinking, or portrayed in funny poses. The past relives in the small animated stories of people who are saved from oblivion and the tragic dimension of time lived.
That of the National WWI Museum and Memorial, the United States museum dedicated to the First World War, is a vast collection of gifs that has no equal.
Foto: National WWI Museum and Memorial
The promoters of this initiative plan to reach a younger audience to bring it closer to the history of the Great War through the use of modern technology, known to the new generations who make extensive use of it on apps and social networks.
The experts in charge worked hard for six months to examine the archive material, belonging not only to the US repertoire but also to that of France, Germany and Russia. Black and white films and recordings of the time that, once selected, have been reworked and transformed into gifs to be shared online.
The US National Archives also used animated images to document historical events such as the Normandy landings and NASA’s Apollo space program. The National Museum of African American History and Culture itself honored with a series of gifs the civil rights protest march of 1963, in which Marthin Luther King delivered the famous speech entitled I have a dream.