A cinemagraph combines simple animation/movement with a still image to produce a “hybrid” that mixes elements of video motion with a still image.

You can either take a still image and add motion/animation to it, or take a video and make parts of it “still” will keeping other parts with motion.

In the video below I used a still image of a cup of coffee, then I used a program called Nature Illusion to add a water effect to the coffee to add movement. Nature Illusion is kind of buggy and is pretty much limited to adding ripple effects to simulate moving water, although it does have rain and snow overlays.

Here’s another very basic example…I took a still image of Clint Eastwood and added some animation to Clint’s eyes using CrazyTalk Animator Pro 1:
http://kurtmelvin.com/cinemagraphs/preview.html

Note: I thought it would be cool to also have the end of his cigar glow and have some smoke floating up, but didn’t want to spend the time to do it just for this example.

In this cinemagraph I used Cliplets, which is a free program from Microsoft. The process was pretty much the opposite if the Clint cinemagraph. The entire original video has motion, but using Cliplets I made most of the video’s area static, leaving just the one flower in the lower right corner with movement:

Here’s some videos tutorials for using Cliplets:

This page has some great examples of cool cinemagraphs:

https://econsultancy.com/blog/66568-how-cinemagraphs-are-helping-brands-break-away-from-static-content/

Download the FREE Cliplets program here:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/7daad1b9-b708-4fb6-a463-211d4fcf5fca/

Note about the Cliplets program: It will only work with videos of 10 seconds or less. If you import a longer video, it will clip the video to 10 seconds. However, at least on my system, it took forever for the program to clip my video files. I suggest you use another video editing program to clip the original video to 10 seconds or less.

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