I recently came upon a cool, new style of animated image called a cinemagraph. They were created by photographer Jamie Beck and web/motion designer Kevin Burg.
According to Beck, thanks to The Atlantic:
“We began seriously creating them during fashion week this past
February. Our first few animated images were sequenced still shots
looped in rapid succession which is a fairly common way of making an
animated image. From there we began utilizing more fluid motion isolated
in certain parts of an image to capture a moment of time, but also to
un-freeze a still photograph by showing that moment’s temporal movement.
The process involves still and video photography but editing is very
manual and varies greatly from one to another so we’re routinely solving
new problems when creating them.
We feel there are many exciting applications for this type of moving
image. There’s movement in everything and by capturing that plus the
great things about a still photograph you get to experience what a video
has to offer without the time commitment a video requires. 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.
To put it in less “artspeak” form: Our Cinemagraphs are a way of
adding motion to a still image. On average, the more intricate ones take
a day to edit and the simpler ones take 3-4 hours. It’s something we’d
been experimenting with for about a year but it really came together
during fashion week with the post “Les Tendrils” and culminated with
“Anna Sees Everything” which touches on the “ultimate portrait” — an
image that captures the essence of a person through an action or a scene
they are closely associated with. Another example of that is “We all
get dressed for Bill.” The image format of these is .gif — and that’s
been highly influential to their style since a .gif adds many
interesting and archaic limitations to what is possible. The .gif format
is practically as old as the internet itself and we find it interesting
that as a format it’s getting new life, particularly on Tumblr. But
ultimately it’s a delivery mechanism in the same way JPEG is to still
images.
Tumblr has been integral to the success of our images, both as a
publishing platform but also as a direct supporter through their fashion
week initiative to the recent collaboration with Coco Rocha.”
I searched the interwebs and found some really great examples of cinemagraphs from horror classics:
The Fearless Vampire Killers
Psycho
The Shining
Taxi Driver
Young Frankenstein
UPDATE: I had to go in and embed each cinemagraph in order for it to work right, as apparently Blogger automatically converts gif files to jpgs. What a pain...
And alas, it's time for my second movie review! (For those that missed it, you can read the first review here). This time, I'm going to review the new cult classic, Tom Six's The Human Centipede.
My review? NEXT TIME, SLEEP WITH THE CREEPY, FAT GUY.
So there you have it! Another expert review summed up in eight simple words. But as a bonus to all my loyal readers:
