Cinemagraphs

This post is a summary of my short-lived blog about my love of Cinemagraphs (and Animations), as well as my attempts at making them. It all started (as with most good things in life) when I was a kid. I loved animated things.

The first programs I used were MS Paint and MagicHat (or at least I think it was called this), a marvelous little program that would play all the images in a file sequentially – giving the impression of an animation. I was addicted to it.

My mom, at that time, was doing some freelance design, and so had acquired a computer and Corel Draw. Vectors meant nothing to me back then, but I started getting into Photopaint: especially the ability to scan images and animate them (similar to MagicHat, on a frame-by-frame basis, and save them out as GIF’s).

This interest in animation was something that I was always playing with, whether as GIF’s or little page flip animations, etc. Flash animation eventually came along, but with zero experience in Adobe products, it was too intimidating.

Being careless and young, I have none of these original animations, in any format. After finishing school I decided to study animation.

I love being creative, taking photos, drawing, painting, even dabbling in music (I must admit that my visual skills are much better than my audio skills), and so there are many things that I enjoy, but I’ve always felt a bit staggered, a Jack of all trades if you will. Jumping back a little: what positivity I did take from Film School, was the people I met there: they were creative and interesting. It made me really fall in love with people and the things people do. Now how to connect this with the creative things I love? I did not know, until one day, very recently (at the time I originally wrote this), I discovered Cinemagraphs. Living Photos. I love the concept so much.

What I love most about art, in any format, is capturing a moment – whether from real life or the imagination. I’ve always thought of my artworks as a snapshot of a bigger reality, in a way, I’ve always been a story-teller, but not a comedian. What I mean by that is that I love little stories, writing poems is amongst my repertoire of creativity, but I am bad at punch lines. I suck at coming up with an end. Thus I write poems, and not short stories. So these Cinemgraphs, they are just like poems: capturing the little poetic stories that make life so beautiful. This GIF that started it all, as posted on DeviantART, the positive response fed my interest in short looping animations, and eventually led to my love of Cinemagraphs: poetry in motion.