Is it a photo? Is it a video? The world may never know. But here's what we do know: A cinemagraph is an animated GIF or video of a still photo in which a movement occurs - think of it like an image that contains a living moment within itself. The cinemagraph concept was created by
Visual Graphics Artist Kevin Burg and photographer Jamie Beck who had a desire to communicate more to viewers in an image and capture the essence of a moment in time.
We were motivated to do this project because we've seen it widely used on platforms like Tumblr and think it's #hella cool to mix static and dynamic elements into one form, and we too are #helluva (creative) engineers. We went around Barcelona, taking videos of our favorite spots, being sure to capture a specific moving subject that we wanted to isolate. We converted the video into a GIF and designed a mask that separated what we wanted to freeze and what we wanted to remain animated.
1. Film a video.
2. Convert video to a GIF.
3. Select a frame from the GIF and generate the mask.
4. Use the mask to freeze a region of the GIF and keep movement on another region.
We obtained the final cinemagraph by blending the original clip with the "masked" clip. The full code can be found here. Here is some example output that we got:
| Original GIF | Mask | Cinemagraph |
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