Gallery: Vintage Photos Enter Spooky Afterlife as Animated GIFs
01czar-michael
*Kevin Weir turns vintage photos, like this portrait of a Russian royal, into expressive animated .gifs. "To me, this guy looked like he's haunted by nightmare eyeballs," Weir says. "I decided to make his nightmares come true whenever he closes his eyes."*
02priest-valamo-monastery-karelia-russia
*"This guy doesn't look like a priest but if he is, what kind of gods does he worship?" Weir says of the Russian church leader. "Could he be a pagan? He looks like a man of immense, ancient power."*
03clearing-away-debris
*Weir created subtle fog animation to set the mood for this piece. "This photograph initially stood out to me because it has such beautiful composition and really tells a story: the rubble in the foreground. The silhouetted ruins in the background. The impenetrable fog. I've read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft, and Cthulhu sprang into mind as the culprit for this devastation."*
04bruges
*To embellish the original photograph of an empty street, Weir pulled in a pair of pedestrians from another photo. "I saw a face in the building," he says. "The storefront is a gaping mouth, waiting for passersby to let their guard down. I had to add the pedestrians so the building would have something to destroy."*
05boxing
*"There are hundreds of boxing photographs in the archives and I usually skip past them, but I noticed a crack in the wall on this particular image that got me wondering about what could be going on in there," Weir says. "From there I got into the implications of a infinite boxing universes."*
06neidenburg-church
*"When I looked at the building in this photograph, I saw a face," Weir says. "I wanted it to come to life."*
07subway-fire
*Weir layered dozens of pictures to create the nature setting envisioned by the man on the left. "The original image is this crowded, chaotic urban scene," he says. "In the middle of what looks to me like a squad of firefighters, there's this guy who's staring off into his own world. He's looking up, wishing he were somewhere else."*
08krupp-von-bohlen
*"He looks like an untrustworthy character and he's wearing an interesting hat, which looked like it should open up," Weir says of this photo of Krupp Von Bohlen. "My imagination latched onto that and took it from there."*
09mother-jones
*Turn-of-the-century feminist [Mother Jones](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Harris_Jones) struck Weir as a mythic character. "She seems shrouded in mysticism, full of mischief and hidden power," he says. "She's exactly the type of person that would burst into a flock of crows."*
10decoy-gun
*Weir describes this as one of his more "conceptual" pieces. "There's a conflict between the cannon, which has the sole purpose of destruction, and the soldier, whose soul is capable of both good and evil," he says.*
