Creating Cinemagraphs and Plotagraphs

- Hi, my name's Rich Harrington and welcome to this course where we'll explore cinemagraphs and Plotagraphs. Now, you might not be familiar with the term cinemagraph, but it's a specialized type of graphic. Essentially, it's a really high-end animated GIF or a looping movie and there are several different ways to create these. Some folks start with photographs. Others use time-lapse material, high-speed bursts of photography, or even video. In this course, we'll talk about all of these different techniques, as well as several different tools.

There are a lot of different things that we're going to cover. First I'm going to walk you through some of the different techniques that are used and walk you through the general art form. This is a type of graphic that's well-served for a variety of different users, whether you're creating content for dynamic advertising, expressing yourself artistically, or just looking for some way to stand out on social media. Many different people can benefit from this type of dynamic content. Once we've got that down, we'll talk about some shooting techniques. We'll explore some strategies of using a mirrorless or DSLR camera to capture this type of content.

I'll walk you through composition advice, as well as file format advice, and give you a practical shooting example. We're also going to take a look at the delivery formats. There are really two major ways of going about this. Exporting an animated GIF, which is a very old format that's broadly compatible, but has some technical limitations, or using video, which is rising in popularity. We'll talk about the benefits of each and what different social media platforms support. We'll then create a cinemagraph using a tool that many of you are likely familiar with, Adobe Photoshop.

I'll walk you through opening up a video file, freezing parts of it, and creating the composite image. Once that's done, we'll explore a tool from Flixel called Cinemagraph Pro. It's a specialized tool available for Mac and iOS, and you'll learn how to use this tool to create cinemagraphs. We'll also talk about a tool called BLINK Cliplets, which comes from Microsoft. It's available for both the Windows phone operating system, which most of you will not have access to. But more importantly, it's available for Windows, and it's a free application that you can use to create cinemagraph content.

We'll then explore a new format, Plotagraph. Plotagraph is a software service available through the internet and you can run it on a tablet or a desktop, and it allows you to create dynamic content from static photos. While the end result is very similar to a cinemagraph, the execution and where you start is very different, and I'll walk you through how it works. Then, we'll explore Adobe After Effects. This is a complex motion graphics tool, but makes the ability to create cinemagraphs a lot easier.

It offers powerful masking tools, as well as other advanced effects, like compositing, keying, and even particle systems. We'll scratch the surface of what After Effects can do. But you can continue your training here in the online library if you'd like to learn more about using After Effects. Once this is all done, we'll then refresh and revisit with what different social media platforms support. I'll walk you through some of the export concerns and how to optimize your images so they're small, but still look good.

Well, we got a lot of ground to cover, so let's jump in and start to explore the world of dynamic content.