My good ole friend Jack introduced me to this song, Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know,” a few weeks ago and it has been with me ever since.
This is your typical break up song, and the main idea is about that horrible feeling after a break up when you realize that you don’t know the person in the present anymore, that they are now “somebody that you used to know.”  The first half of the song is Gotye’s solo.  You can tell that he is upset because he tried to make a relationship work that obviously couldn’t. Once they broke up, she sent her friends over to get her stuff and changed her phone number so he can’t contact her anymore. “You treat me like a stranger and I feel so rough,”  he laments.

There is a pause in the lyrics and the camera pans to Kimbra and she gives her side of the story.  “Now and then I think of all the times you screwed me over,” she says.  Then Gotye lets out this visible sigh, and this felt really powerful to me.

It perfectly conveys the emotions that he projects in this song: regret of his mistakes, sadness that this is where they are now, and longing for a friendship that doesn’t exist anymore. It felt like the most important part of the entire song to me, except you can’t hear it in the song; only see it in the video.  I felt like making this a looping gif would capture all of his emotions here.  Plus, the visuals are awesome!

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I made this gif as a loop.  I deleted all of the frames except for the ones from a pause before he sighs until he is mid-sigh.  Then, I made each layer a duplicate. When I rearranged the frames, I actually did not use his exhale from the video, and instead put the frames of his inhale backwards so that it looped full circle.

So, the frames sequence looks like this:

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 –

This avoids any awkward visual jumps and instead makes the gif look way cleaner.

I hope that this makes sense, DS106!