Some people call them “animated GIF’s.” Others call them “Cinemagraphs.” I like the term “Cinemagraph,” so I’ll use that.
A cinemagraph shows motion in what would normally be a stock, sterile picture. And the other day, I created my first one.
Background.
Last March, I took a vacation in beautiful Saint John, New Brunswick. At one point on a dark night, I walked through Saint John’s harbour neighborhood and captured some photos of this, that and the other thing – in this case, a photo of an illuminated Popsicle factory sign, as it was reflected in a rain puddle.
So here’s the first one. At the time, when I blogged about taking this picture, I said the following:
What you’re seeing in this blog post today are simple photo captures. And when I get home from my vacation and I load all these photographs into my main computer, with all the digital editing software and whatnot… you know I’m going to put together something even better than what you see today.
And with that in mind…
This is what I originally took.
Now at the time, I didn’t know if I could ever get a decent animated cinemagraph out of this image. In fact, most cinemagraphs are created with digital video, and then the frames from the digital video are converted into a motion image.
So I’m doing this from the other direction. Like that’s anything different for me.
I used an online program called Gickr, which allows me to upload a maximum of ten photographs to their server. Once they have the pictures, they convert the graphics to an animated GIF. They can then host the photos on their site, and I can download the cinemagraphs that they produce and save them on my hard drive.
I took ten pictures in sequence, and then imported them into the Gickr cinegraph-creating program.
And I got this.
Hokey smokes. It worked.
So what do I do with this technology?
Oh come on. You know me, you’ve read my blog long enough. If I can make THIS image, based on some sequential photos I took earlier this year… Trust me, I’ve already got some ideas for future Cinemagraphs. In fact – just by working on this one graphic –
My little brain has come up with an idea to create a Cinemagraph that can be viewed as a regular printed picture. That’s right. By next year, you might be able to go to the Altamont Fair and see, hanging on a wall, a Chuck Miller-created Cinemagraph.
What… you think I’m kidding?Do I look like someone that kids about these things? (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha)
Chuck The Writer 