Making Moving Pictures
Starting with cinema-graphs, I was completely unaware of what they were unlike I was with gifs. I needed to conduct a little research to comprehend what I was supposed to make, which I did on Pinterest for a few hours.
After finding multiple examples and inspiration in general, I went out to attempt to capture videos to manipulate into cinema-graphs. In class, my classmates and I recorded a video of us making a potted plant appear to be moving by the wind, which we worked on and were proud of for our first attempt but when it came time for us to turn in our work, it didn’t look as professional as we had hoped for.
When we were first assigned this project, I wanted to record a video involving water because the cinema-graphs I saw that involved water were especially calming and aesthetically pleasing to the viewer.
It took many tries to get the video perfect because I kept moving my hand on the faucet and my hand holding the phone. In the end, it was the second to last try that ended up cutting the cinema-graph.
To turn the video into a cinema-graph, I uploaded the file into Photoshop and brought up the video-editing timeline at the bottom. I used the command A, C and V keys to take a screenshot of the best possible place in the video to make the editing look seamless.
I then brought that layer up above the video group and moved it above the video was on the timeline. I trimmed the video to where the water flowed the best for it to match the screenshot.
I created a layer mask over the water on the screenshot to make it look like only the water is moving, like many of the cinema-graphs I viewed on Pinterest. I kept testing and retesting the video to make sure everything was working right, and nothing was glitching.
In the end, I exported the video for web legacy and saved it as a gif.
For my second gif, I wanted to incorporate something television or media related. To keep a neutral background, I placed my iPad on my bathroom carpet, which is grey to contrast the black of the tablet.
I put on one of the episodes of “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” because the intro for the show is absolutely gorgeous and seamlessly fluid with its motion. I recorded myself with my finger above the screen to act like I had clicked the tablet for the entirety of the intro to get enough footage to work with.
It took many tries for my hands to stop shaking and get the footage to be somewhat still for capture. To turn the video into a cinema-graph, I uploaded the file into Photoshop and brought up the video-editing timeline at the bottom.
I used the command A, C and V keys to take a screenshot of the best possible place in the video to make the editing look seamless. I then brought that layer up above the video group and moved it above the video was on the timeline. I trimmed the video to where my finger remained the most still for it to match the screenshot.
I created a layer mask over the iPad screen on the screenshot to make it look like only the intro on the screen is moving, like many of the ads, I constantly see for Netflix. I kept testing and retesting the video to make sure everything was working right, and nothing was glitching.
In the end, I exported the video for web legacy and saved it as a gif. These projects were though to plan out and make but, in the end, I was proud of my results and plan on making many more cinema-graphs in the future.
