We're all mad here

step 1 – making the base gifs

the first step will be to make your four base gifs as you usually do, for this tutorial i'll be using just this one gif (my wife <3) bc i'm lazy :)

step 2 – coloring the gifs

the next step will be to color the gif you've made! using my previous tutorial on how to change the background color in a gif, i gave my gif a light blue background!

step 3 – adding the film strip

once you're done and have the gif in timeline mode, we'll add in a film strip png - i used this one below and made it b&w but there's loads more pngs you can find in places such as pinterest!

simply adjust the timeline length of the png layer, and place it how you want it in your gif - for my set i tilted it slightly (i also had to drag the gif in the bg up a little bit so that his entire face would still be in frame)

step 4 – adding shapes

now by using the rectangle tool (found on the left hand sidebar, pictured below) we'll be adding in a rectangle roughly the shape of one frame in the film strip

after adding in the rectangle, i zoom my workspace in to about 300% to make the rectangle match up with the frame in the film strip as accurately as i can

as soon as i feel it fits well enough, i just duplicate the layer two times and drag it over to cover the other two frames

you might still have to edit the other two rectangle layers to fit the film strip frames better, but as you can see i don't go into super detail as there's still a few pixels of the original film strip visible at the edges

step 5 - adding the three bottom gifs

as said, i'll be working with one gif so i just copy pasted the base gif layer - but what you want to do is just simply drag your other gifs (make sure they're in timeline mode) over to the one you're working in

then place the gifs on top of the film strip frames the way you want them to turn out (like below)

make sure that the gif layers are always right on top of their corresponding rectangle layers! this is important because we'll be creating a clipping mask for all the gif layers - you can do this by clicking cmd/ctrl + alt + g or by right clicking on the gif layer and choosing "create clipping mask"

once you do this you go from your film strip frames looking like above, to them looking like below

and that's it, really! you're now ready to save your gif :)

(it looks a bit silly bc i reused the same gif 4 times but you get the image!)