Up Your GIF Game With New Web-App "Klear"

Vince McKelvie And Yung Jake made a user-friendly app that offers you the ability to warp and manipulate GIFs to your liking.

by Benoit Palop

June 5, 2014, 7:00pm

A few months ago, Los Angeles-based net-artist Vince McKelvie teamed-up with contemporary LaTurbo Avedonto offer Club Rothko Builder, a web-based application that allows users to create their own stunning GIFs, thanks to the same techniques used by LaTurbo in her shape-bending digital art project, New Sculpt.

Recently, McKelvie joined forces with artists and social media-focused rapper Yung Jake to create Klear, a new web application that can provide an unconventional twist to GIFs through use of color-manipulation and the option to save the results in an online database.

Color/Chroma key is a special effects application often applied in photo and video post-production that plays with hues, colors, and the transparency of pixels. Its main function allows artists to isolate a subject from its background and integrate it in another background.

With Klear, artists can upload and generate glitchy GIFs through a user-friendly inteface, and then control the key, switch among different blend modes, and choose a wide range of effects—from a basic key to a heavy glitch.

McKelvie’s Tumblr explorations have largely contributed to the genesis of this project, most notably when he discovered some eye-catching GIFs by oscob. “I was really into his transparent GIFs, but didn’t clear the last frame so they left behind this glitchy trail after every frame," McKelvie told The Creators Project. “Then I thought of making an online tool to so anyone could make these type of GIFs."

As for the technical aspect, the application was developed through HTML5 —a tag used to draw graphics on the fly via JavaScript. This process allows multiplatform access to Klear, including mobile devices, desktops, and laptops. The multi-platform, highly-accessible qualities of the app ensure that this project stays true to the all-inclusive aspect of GIF-making.

Klear offiicially opened to the whole web today, but since we were too excited to explore its capabilities, we asked a few of our favorite net-artists—including McKelvie and Yung Jake—to test out the application. Here's what they came back with: