I decided that with all of the animated GIFs being posted to DS106, I would try my hand at creating a Cinemagraph, which is a specific form of animated GIF, described as “somewhere between a still photograph, and a video”.
My inspiration came from this collection of movie Cinemagraphs, and I used this tutorial to get the general idea.
This scene in particular comes from the film “Baraka”, during the portion of the film titled “The Hard Side Of Life“. For those not familiar with the film, it is a sort-of documentary, but explaining it in any detail is hard. I highly recommend it.
A simple beautiful, yet devastating moving image. Great stuff. And thanks for the link to the tutorial. I’m going to have to experiment with this and do a screen possibly. Though it’ll take way too long!
Besides the excellent cinemagraph, thanks for the link to the tutorial. I tried to do a cinemagraph this summer with Photoshop. You’d think using a powerful tool like that to create masks and create an animated gif would be simple, right? Nope! Hard, hard, hard…..hoping this will make it easier!
Thanks Ben. I tried it the way the tutorial laid out first, but something wasn’t quite working the way they had it. I had that ever-vexing problem where they tell you to make sure a button is checked, but when you actually go to do it said button is greyed out. In this case it was the “Unify” buttons. I ended up getting it done using the method one of the commenters mentioned by laying the base static image over the moving sequence and adding a layer mask to cut out the portion that I wanted to move. Basically the same idea as what the tutorial discusses, but in reverse. I had the luxury of an otherwise static shot, so it probably wouldn’t work if there’s panning or too much unnecessary motion.
Just watched this movie again last weekend. A very powerful film and this scene stayed with me more than the many other powerful moments. You captured this image beautifully.
Both the film and the Cinemagraph technique are new to me. The image you’ve created is stunning.
I’m eager to learn how to do it and I also want to see this Baraka film.
I also kinda wish I could be taking this ds106 course. There’s plenty of awesomeness being churned out.
Thank you.