What sits between photos and videos? Some might say the now-popular gif animations: two, three or more static images looped over and over again, usually for comic effect. Cliplets, however, might be the truest expression of that middle ground.

Built in Microsoft’s Research Labs, Cliplets is actually a freely downloadable Windows 7 app that lets you take a 10-second video clip and then manipulate it so portions of it run (usually in a loop) while the rest remains static. The effect is often called a “cinema graph” and essentially creates something akin to the living photos J.K. Rowling introduced with her Harry Potter book series and then filmmakers illustrated throughout all eight of the Harry Potter films.

Cliplets do not, for now, react to the outside world. They simply run like any other video, but the effect can still be quite startling and entertaining.

Microsoft Researcher Neel Joshi, Ph.D., who created Cliplets with a research intern, called the process “computational photography.” Neel said the mental photo people take and the one they end up with don’t always match up. Cliplets puts a little story — perhaps the one you wanted to tell — inside the photo.

Creating a Cliplets is easy. Just grab any Windows Movie file or MP4 and drop it into the editing window. Cliplets will only create a 10 second clip, so no matter how long the original video is, Cliplets will guide you to find the appropriate 10 second portion. Cliplets first removes whatever jittery hand-held camera motion might exist in the clip so the background can be more or less stable and smooth while a selected portion moves.

With that done, you find an interesting still frame, and then, with a rudimentary marquee tool, you select portions of the video you want to run in a loop, reverse (or mirror) or simply to play when someone opens the clip. Cliplets actually lets you select multiple portions of the video in what it calls layers. There’s even a timeline so you can decide exactly when the various portions of the video start and stop. Cliplets are not actually photos — the final output is a 10-second video.

Neel said Microsoft never intended to release the app to the public, but the researchers eventually changed their minds last month. Now — though Neel is still working on a Cliplets research paper — people are downloading the free Windows 7 app and creating their own Cliplets, many of which are being shared, naturally, on Tumblr, right alongside all those animated Gifs.

Check out the video above for a tutorial and my own first sample Cliplet. You can download the app here.

You can see my test here. Tell us about your Cliplets experiments in the comments.