I absolutely love these things. For starters, they’re pretty creepy, which is almost always a good thing… unless it’s the combover / shirt-pocket full of lollipops type of creepy. I think what really enchants me about them though, is how they break some sort of reality barrier in my mind. I get the feeling like these are real people trapped in photos… and I can’t stop staring.
I found out this art-form is actually called a cinemagraph, but there’s an iphone app called cinemagram, which is why I was searching to begin with. I was tipped off to the app by a tweet from Zadi Diaz, who used to be the host of my favorite web show, Epic Fu, before they just mysteriously stopped creating new content without offering any warning or explanation. I’m not bitter.
There are plenty of people making cinemagraphs, but not many doing it well. When I did this search I found dozens of best-of lists, but they all had the same pictures… almost all ripped from the same website. The site belongs to Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg. They were actually the ones to coin the term cinemagraph when they started trapping people’s souls inside photographs in 2011.