Cinemagraph animated GIF
While animated GIFs have been around for a while, they’ve recently been adopted by photographers to add small amounts of looping motion to otherwise still images. It’s no wonder they’ve been seen all over the web lately, as the result is often a quite entrancing moving photograph. If you’re interested in making your own, Photojojo offers a detailed write up of how to make these so-called “cinemagraphs,” from planning the right motion to the final assembly in Photoshop. And if you’re looking for a little inspiration, check out the work of photographer Jamie Beck and motion graphics designer Kevin Burg, who are responsible for popularizing this trend. According to Jamie, “There’s something magical about a still photograph—a captured moment in time—that can simultaneously exist outside the fraction of a second the shutter captures.”

BY Matt Richardson

Matt Richardson is a Brooklyn-based creative technologist, contributing editor for MAKE magazine, and co-author of Getting Started with Raspberry Pi. He's also the owner of Awesome Button Studios, a technology consultancy. Highlights from his work include the Descriptive Camera (a camera which outputs a text description instead of a photo) and The Enough Already (a DIY celebrity-silencing device). Matt's work has been featured at The Nevada Museum of Art, The Rome International Photography Festival, Milan Design Week and has garnered attention from The New York Times, Wired, and New York Magazine.

4 Responses to How-To: Cinemagraphs

  1. Anonymous on said:

    (meh…)imagemagick>  convert -delay 17 -loop 0 dog_jumping*.jpg animated_dog.gif

    but who’s to blame for all the GUGA (gratuitous usage of gif animation)?  harry_potter?  4chan?  madison_avenue?  someone must be blamed!

    • imagemagick isn’t going to properly isolate the area of interest all on its own.

      It’s a completely different effect if the entire frame is animating. (You don’t think she held that book pixel-perfect still while she blinked?)

      That said, I don’t really see the appeal of these.  They’re just creepy.

  2. Anonymous on said:

    This is the right blog for anyone who wants to find out about this topic. You realize so much its almost hard to argue with you (not that I actually would want…HaHa). You definitely put a new spin on a topic thats been written about for years. Great stuff, just great! | 

  3. jeff martin on said:

    I am a fan of Photoshop and have been so since….well a long time. I Googled ‘how to make a Cinemagraph’ and found this YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRpqtrN_O_M This lead me the site cinegif.com which has a much easier and faster way. Just my 2 cents!

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