Hi, I know you made a tutorial for making stim gifs before but I was wondering if you had any advice on how to find cool stim sources like you do in the first place? I'm super curious cos I feel like searching places like instagram and youtube could get super time consuming or overwhelming. So I thought I'd ask! Thanks~
Yes, looking for sources can be very time consuming and my process might not help much, but I'll share it anyway :)
Under a cut because I have a lot to say, lol
General tip
So the thing that has helped me the most is to make looking for sources it's own separate task. If I'm sitting down to do gif making, and in that time I also have to find sources, I get overwhelmed pretty quickly. So by the time I get to the gif making part, I usually already have some sources saved on instagram or bookmarked in my browser.
Sometimes I don't have enough sources for a board and I may do a quick supplemental search, but often this leads to my brain 'switching tasks' and I have a hard time going back to gif making. Or there will be times when I have a video saved and by the time I get around to giffing I forgot what I wanted to gif it for. So maybe it's not the best process but it's what works best for me.
Starting from a source
An easy way to begin looking for sources is to find a gif you like and follow it back to the source.
If it's a youtube source, you can let the algorithm recommend different videos, or you can go to the profile of the video poster, and look through their other videos.
If it's on instagram, you can search through the profile for other videos that weren't giffed, or you can look at what kind of tags they're using and type those into the search filter. Unfortunately instagram does not have a way to filter out videos vs. photos (that I know of), which is why I don't use it that much. Most of my instagram gifs are from people I follow or something that came up in a supplemental search because I wasn't finding what I wanted on youtube.
What to type in the search bar
If you're starting from scratch, staring at the search bar wondering what to put in, I've been there too. I owe a lot of my unique gifs on the unique requests I get. But when you don't have any requests to prompt you, think about something you might like. Favorite animals, favorite textures, or colors. If you can't pick something, try just typing 'asmr' or 'satisfying' and see what comes up.
A lot of asmr videos that pop up for me are of people speaking into a microphone and tapping their fingers on it, which isn't something I usually gif, but it can give me ideas of other things I might be interested in.
A quick glance at a thumbnail might show this asmr person uses bubble wrap, and while I know their video style isn't going to work for me, I could be inspired to type in bubble wrap in the search instead.
Or if someone is wearing gloves, I might be inspired to make a bunch of videos on gloves (anyone else remember all my gloves gifs)
Another thing to consider when looking through youtube, is that if you're looking for something with people, it will almost always show white creators on top. It can help to type ethnicities (Jamaican, Vietnamese, etc.) to try and get more diverse content. [this rarely works for food as it will usually show white people making ethnic food :( ]
Looking through videos
Once my search has begun, I usually start playing music or watching a show in the background. Then I mute my computer and just start playing videos. On youtube, I usually go for thumbnails that are nice (not too blurry) but not clickbait-y (This Shocking Video!).
I'll run my pointer to view the preview and see if there are any good looking moments. Paying attention to how things move, color changes, light movement, etc.
If I find a good moment, I bookmark it, then look at the recommended videos. If a video looks addictively good to me, I usually click on the uploader's profile instead and look through videos there.
Once I feel I've exhausted the algorithm, I go back to my initial search and see if any more videos look promising there. Or I may choose to search again with different keywords based on what caught my interest in other videos.
Doing Research
There have been a couple times where I know what I want to gif but can't get the keywords to work for me. The example I remember off the top of my head is when I was making the purple nature board. I knew I wanted to have a bird in it to mirror the other color nature board I did, but typing in 'purple bird' got me nowhere.
So I stopped looking for videos and started googling. Are there purple birds? The Costa's Hummingbird is what I was looking for and using that term I was able to find a better video.
Sometimes you can find reddit threads where people recommend satisfying videos or asmrtists with good visuals.
The End
So it really is just a bunch of clicking and going down an internet rabbit hole, but I hope that gives you a starting off point and gives some insight into my process.
If there are specific gifs where you wonder how I came across them, I probably remember how I tracked them down and am happy to share :)
pixelskylines
vaporwave
stormborns
areudirty
janainaart
ellievsbear
kaledo-art
