Natalie Palamides and GIPHY Studios Present: The Father’s Day Content We Didn’t Know We Needed

For Father’s Day this year, Natalie Palamides and GIPHY Studios would like to introduce you to The World’s Greatest Dad. He grills, he loves his country, he knows a lot about bananas, and he is ready to grace your conversations wherever you use GIPHY.

World’s Greatest Dad comes from the comedic mind of Natalie, who partnered with GIPHY Studios — GIPHY’s creative studio who frequently collaborates with creators and entertainers — to help bring her character to life via the formats of GIFs, Stickers, and GIPHY Clips. The whole collection debuts today, right in time to celebrate Father’s Day, and you can find all the content here!

We could go on and on about why we at GIPHY love this character so much, but who better to tell you all about him than Natalie herself. Read on for our Q&A with Natalie about why she chose to collaborate with GIPHY Studios, how she created this character, and more about her own creative process.

GIPHY: So tell us about this dad… why a dad character? What inspired you?

Natalie: I pitched a bunch of characters to GIPHY and we landed on doing the dad character because the timing lined up well with Father’s Day just around the corner. I think I was attracted to the dad character because I love dads, I love my dad, I just think there’s a lot of fun to be had just poking fun at dads with love and joy behind it.

The world’s greatest dad is just a dad that’s trying his best to be his greatest and he’s always messing up, he’s always the idiot, but we love him anyway.

GIPHY: And why work with GIPHY Studios?

Natalie: I was interested in working with GIPHY on this project because they said they wanted to embrace the process for how I make my live shows through making GIFs. That sounded really interesting and fun to try to bring what I do on stage. My process is very much just throwing crap at the wall, so going to something that’s being recorded does create a little bit of pressure — Hopefully we got some good stuff. We threw some crap at the wall during this process and I think there was some sticky ones — can I say shit? We threw some shit at the wall and there was some sticky shit, I hope.

GIPHY: As you know GIPHY is delving into video with GIPHY Clips and we’re so excited some of your content will be featured as Clips. Thoughts on short-form video in general?

Natalie: It’s really fun to have the chance to create these short videos because you can kind of pick apart a piece of garbage that you improvised or a terrible scene and still find a little moment in there that’s good or a little bit of gold and I love the freedom in that.

GIPHY: Can you tell us a little bit more about your creative process?

Natalie: My typical process for character development is I pick a costume usually for a character and I try to find their voice. Sometimes I will play with finding the voice on stage. I invite an audience for free to watch me develop this character because I’m not going to charge people to watch me do a bad character. I’ll write a list of a bunch of images and I’ll make a list of props that I need. I’ll go get all the props and bring it to the theater and I have this set list of images that I want to try out and I just kind of improvise in the character and find them that way.

I thank everybody for their patience in working with me in this way because it’s much different when you try to do something that’s so unplanned for a production that needs to be shot and prepped for. Usually I’m so used to doing something just on a whim and if I think of it like an hour before the show I’ll go to a Goodwill and try and find the prop. And actually, knock on wood, I’ve had really good luck. Every time I’ve needed a prop right before a show I go to Goodwill and I find it there. Even a mannequin. One time I needed a female mannequin and I went to Goodwill and they didn’t have one in the store but I went into the back room and just tried to be really nice and I saw a mannequin and I begged the guy for the mannequin.

So the way that I was able to adapt my process for this project was basically to just get a ton of props and list a bunch of images and communicate that to the team like what kind of settings we wanted, and just the ideas that I wanted to play with. I was lucky enough that they trusted me to throw shit at the wall (or crap at the wall if I’m not allowed to say shit). I felt just super lucky that I had that trust there and that they allowed me to play and to find stuff.

The way that I tend to work is by finding the gold in the mistakes or the accidents and often when you are improvising or clowning you’ll improvise something better than anything that you ever could have thought of and once that mistake happens or that improvisation happens you clock it and you keep it and do it again and again and again and refine it until it’s a really solid joke. Hopefully we did that here!

GIPHY: Ok, some rapidfire questions. What’s your favorite dad joke?

Natalie: I guess the ‘pull my finger’ and farting is a classic. I’m always attracted to physical gags.

GIPHY: If you were a dad, what would your ideal Father’s Day be?

Natalie: If I were a dad, my ideal Fathers Day would be to take my kids out on a canoe on a lake that’s just surrounded by beautiful mountains and we go fishing and we catch some fish for dinner. Maybe we hop into the lake and we relax on our life jackets and we have a little swim and splash water at each other. We dry off and we go back to the campsite and we have a little bonfire and cook our fish over the fire and make smores and tell funny ghost stories to each other and my kids would all laugh and laugh and laugh at my funny daddy ghost stories.

GIPHY: Amazing. Thank you so much for your time!

Natalie: Thanks so much GIPHY for having me, I hope you guys like all the daddy material!

For all of the content from Natalie’s shoot, visit her GIPHY channel at www.giphy.com/nataliepalamides and stay tuned for possibly more content from your new favorite dad.

And for the latest from GIPHY Studios, follow us on Twitter and Instagram @GIPHYStudios!