There are times when, while lurking the web – or as I like to call it – conducting online research, you may stumble upon deliciously awesome work that makes you stop, pay attention and want more… This happened to me recently when I discovered the fuckin’ (yes, so good, it made me curse) stunning collaborative work of Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg. Jamie (Photography), and Kevin (Web Design/Motion) worked together creating beautiful and intricate animated gifs they called Cinemagraphs. Utilizing an old technique to create something new and beautiful with such attention to detail and love is truly impressive and inspiring! Check out more lovely photos after the jump!



Here’s a collection of Cinemagraphs from Jamie’s blog From Me To You. It was so hard to pick any favorites that I grabbed most! Check out Jamie’s blog for more…

“We wanted to tell more of a story than a single still frame photograph but didn’t want the high maintenance aspect of a video…” - Fast Company

Bill Cunningham! :)



So, how are these gems created? Here’s an explanation by Jamie Beck, thanks to The Atlantic .

“We began seriously creating them during fashion week this past February. Our first few animated images were sequenced still shots looped in rapid succession which is a fairly common way of making an animated image. From there we began utilizing more fluid motion isolated in certain parts of an image to capture a moment of time, but also to un-freeze a still photograph by showing that moment’s temporal movement. The process involves still and video photography but editing is very manual and varies greatly from one to another so we’re routinely solving new problems when creating them.

We feel there are many exciting applications for this type of moving image. There’s movement in everything and by capturing that plus the great things about a still photograph you get to experience what a video has to offer without the time commitment a video requires. There’s something magical about a still photograph — a captured moment in time — that can simultaneously exist outside the fraction of a second the shutter captures.

To put it in less “artspeak” form: Our Cinemagraphs are a way of adding motion to a still image. On average, the more intricate ones take a day to edit and the simpler ones take 3-4 hours. It’s something we’d been experimenting with for about a year but it really came together during fashion week with the post “Les Tendrils” and culminated with “Anna Sees Everything” which touches on the “ultimate portrait” — an image that captures the essence of a person through an action or a scene they are closely associated with. Another example of that is “We all get dressed for Bill.” The image format of these is .gif — and that’s been highly influential to their style since a .gif adds many interesting and archaic limitations to what is possible. The .gif format is practically as old as the internet itself and we find it interesting that as a format it’s getting new life, particularly on Tumblr. But ultimately it’s a delivery mechanism in the same way JPEG is to still images.

Tumblr has been integral to the success of our images, both as a publishing platform but also as a direct supporter through their fashion week initiative to the recent collaboration with Coco Rocha.”

************** UPDATE! **************

For those of you loving this lovely work, I wanted to share an update (part deux) to this post. This time, including a radio interview with the artists and more goodies!!!

CHECK IT HERE!!!!

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