I have been wanting for ages to create a successful cinemagraph–a photograph with one small element of movement added to it. I created one once before of a dripping faucet but I wasn’t really happy with it and I struggled with creating it in high quality.
So I decided there’s no time like the present!
Basically, the way to create a cinemagraph is to use a camera that has video capability, and instead of taking a photo of your subject, you take roughly a 10-15 second video of your subject and the movement you want to isolate.
I asked my roommate Zoie to go out with me and shoot, and I have no idea how I talked her in to standing in 15 degree weather without a coat as I ran around her fixing my settings on my camera to get the right shot. Regardless, she was a trooper. We were both freezing by the end of the shoot, but I would the results were worth it!
Once I took the videos I wanted we headed back home and I opened up my footage in Premiere Pro. You want to do your color grading and basic editing in Premiere so you can export the video in to Photoshop. At least, that’s what I initially did. Once I created the looping cinemagraph and masked in the movement I wanted to keep, I wanted to export the cinemagraph as a GIF.
However, the thing about GIFs is that they only have the capacity of about 256 colors. And most videos and photos are in the thousands when it comes to colors. The quality was pixelated and grainy, and the colors weren’t even close to what I intended.
Here’s a still from the GIF I originally made. Yeah, it wasn’t good.
So I did a ton of Googling to see if there was any way to keep the quality while exporting as a GIF, and I found out that it’s pretty much impossible if you have a high quality video with a lot of colors–which is what I had. All that was coming up was creating the cinemagraph as an MP4 instead.
The next hurdle was having to dive back in to my HTML knowledge and relearn how to embed a short video into a webpage while having it auto play upon loading and to play in an infinite loop–so basically a GIF, but a much higher quality than a GIF could give. And I did it! After these frustrating hurdles of GIFs being terrible and trying to figure out how to embed video, and even thinking that I’d never create a cinemagraph I’d be proud of, I managed to pull it all together!
You can definitely see the difference between the two! Again, above is a still from the pixelated GIF, and above is an HD looping MP4.
And then just for fun here’s another still photo of my beautiful friend:
Needless to say, now that I’ve successfully pulled off creating cinemagraphs, I have a feeling that I’ve opened the floodgates. This has just whet my appetite, and I will definitely be making a zillion more of these things in the future.
