Pictures are a thing of beauty; but what if you could view this beauty and some of it moves? Well you can, and these types of images are called cinemagraphs. Cinemagraphs are still photographs in which a minor and repeated movement occur. They are made as a GIF file, and give the viewer the illusion they’re watching a video. They are produced by taking a series of photographs or a video recording and using masking on Photoshop to edit them into a seamless loop of sequential frames.
While looking up artists who make cinemagraphs, I found the website of Jamie Beck and Kevin Berg. These are famous artists who take a lot of footage and pictures form New York and convert it into a moving picture, called a cinemagraph. What this is, is a picture, taken from a short video clip, and transformed to look like a picture, but has one element in the frame that moves.
Fashion Editorial
While learning about animations and what makes them successful, I discovered that the cinemagraph Fashion Editorial follows these guidelines in making a successful clip/image. Firstly, the GIF clearly demonstrates the actual idea of a cinemagraph. It is a photo with subtle movements. At first it appears that the viewer is just looking at an image of a hand on her purse holding keys, but upon closer looks, it can been seen that the keys are swaying back and forth; this makes the GIF cinemagraph successful because it follows the idea of what it actually is, where two or more parts, like the hands or chain of the purse, should move, but only one element does. The second thing that makes the cinemagraph successful is the footage chosen. The footage is, not only original, but well thought out and planned, showing an interesting concept. When deciding what to film to make a cinemagraph, one has to put thought into what elements should move and what elements shouldn’t; if this part of the planning isn’t done, or isn’t done well enough, the final GIF clip will look like a piece of footage, rather then a picture with one subtle movement. This image does follow this guideline and it can clearly be seen that one element moves, in a scene where more things could. Lastly, the third thing that makes this animation successful is the final product is effective. The GIF loops at the right timing, and makes the overall clip run smoothly, with no gap in timing. Thus meaning the footage was successfully masked at the right spots, where the key chain moves into the same spot at the beginning and the end; the overall movement makes sense and the masking done itself was crisp and clear, with no overlay in frames.
I feel that overall this piece is very successful and fully follows the things needed to make a successful cinemagraph. I found this piece, and others done by both these artists to be very interesting and fully capture a unique moving aspect not always expected in their pieces. I like the overall concept of this type of animation, and find that the clips they chose to animate are very realistic and interesting, and can easily capture the viewers attention. I think this piece, and others done by Beck and Berg, are very successful and portray a successful cinemagraph, with an interesting piece choice every time.
To find more artwork done by Jamie Beck and Kevin Berg, visit their website at the following link:
Melissa Reid: Art Portfolio Blog 