An experiment aimed at bringing the Wolf Man back to life as a noir-inspired animated GIF has turned into a monstrous project for a group of New York artists.

The Saline Project's creative team started its Monsters, Villains, Heroes and Victims series as a one-off when director Adam Toht threw on a wig and posed as a werewolf for an impromptu photo session. "We wanted to bring together two of our favorite things: iconic antiheroes and vintage Los Angeles noir," he told Wired.

Soon it became a family affair, with his sister Betony dressing up as a ghost. Brother Ben Toht, working with 3-D artist/designer Jesse Roff and animator Liam Kirtley, turned the detailed photographs into highly stylized animated GIFs. The resulting pop portraits look like film frames lifted from early horror flicks that have been transformed to mimic the 3-D look of lenticular images.

How to Build an Animated Monster GIF

The Toht brothers explain their process:

1. Shoot portrait in studio using strobe lights and digital SLR.
2. Take image into Photoshop and mess with it, sometimes adding things that couldn't be done practically.
3. Cut apart photo, making elements independent of each other.
4. Take file into After Effects and set up character in 3-D space. When virtual camera moves, all parts move appropriately, depending on where they are in 3-D space.
5. Design and build out world using photographic and 3-D elements from Maya animation software.
6. Render files as animated GIFs.

In addition to the pictures in the gallery above – including exclusive first looks at the ghost and Loch Ness monster GIFS – new Monsters, Villains, Heroes and Victims entries will be posted on the Saline Project website, leading up to a Halloween finale. After that, the 13-image series will be available as an art app.

Saline Project hatched the concept in June. "We loved the idea of doing a series that portrayed these classic villains as the heroes of their own story," Ben Toht said in an e-mail to Wired.

Drawing from the black-and-white palette of old crime movies like The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon and horror flicks like Dracula, Frankenstein and Creature From the Black Lagoon, Adam Toht said the series' 3-D imagery makes sense from an aesthetic standpoint.

"There's something about this illusion of depth that seems to reference early cinema, which works well with the classic monster-movie and film-noir themes," he said.

Saline's vintage-looking monsters are part of an unlikely renaissance for the humble animated GIF.

Widely abused in the form of tacky annoyances during the early days of the web, the file format has inspired a new generation of artists to animate subjects ranging from 19th-century photography to vintage comic book covers to *Breaking Bad'*s meth-cooking antihero Walter White.

There's even an ipads app called Echograph that makes the process of creating an animated GIF easier than ever.

Toht said he appreciates the irony that comes in repurposing an ancient web trick for the 21st century.

"The GIF is such an old-school file format," he said. "We're creating these massive, high-resolution 3-D images – about 7 feet tall at full resolution – in this terribly archaic format. It's been intense."