By now the majority of us know what a gif is- if not let me explain. I’m sure you’ve seen one in a comment section of some wacky video, or your gen z and millennial friends respond in a group chat with one.  Its one of those incessantly looped videos sent to you in response to say something without actually saying something.  The gif can be of someone famous raising their eyebrows or screaming in rejoice to indicate in response that was either dumb, to congratulate you, or you left the reader in disbelief, and they’re just not intrigued.  Its either a smirky response or something of joy.  Please see above.

Also I can just tell you the copy and pasted version from online which is : GIF is an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format, a file format that supports both static and animated images. 

But now to the nitty gritty question I hopefully got you interested in! Whats a Stereoscopic Gif?  First we have to know what stereoscopic is.  Stereoscopy is the production of the illusion of depth in a photograph, movie, or other two dimensional image by the presentation of a slightly different angle of the same image to each eye.  Maybe you remember the viewmaster, see below, where you look through two viewfinders of two photos which then completes a scene, but yes with depth! Another great example of stereoscopy are those dinosaur hologram cards that were popular back in the 80s!   See the Viewmaster and dino hologram below.

And when you add gif to the word stereoscopy we land with Stereoscopic Gif, an animated image with the illusion of depth!  Now the film camera I use to make stereoscopic images has 4 lenses side by side and they are inches apart and take the photo simultaneously.  So therefore, one photo at 4 different angles.  See the camera below.  

When I take the photo I am left with 2 negatives that have 4 different pictures. I then layer them all on top of each other and put them in a certain sequence that emphasizes the subject and depth between the foreground and background. Its quite wonderful!  See sample above!