As we were gearing up to release the video for ‘Madness’ Doug Oswandel from the band’s US management proposed the idea of releasing a series of gifs taken from the video.

I spent a long time using Photoshop to cut scenes out of the video and convert them into gifs. Photoshop CS6’s new video editing capabilities did make this task much easier.

The day before the video aired I added a new home page to https://he-3.mu to showcase the gifs. The page runs a php script to randomly select one of the gifs from an array every time the page loads. So clicking on the image or refreshing the page would display a new gif. I also included querystrings that would enable the band to tweet links directly to each of the gifs.

The idea worked really well and Muse fans loved the gifs. The files were re-posted all over Tumblr and Twitter building a load of excitement before we launched the official video the following day.