FRAMED IN TIME: A CINEMAGRAPH SERIES OF ... - Niewland Media

FRAMED IN TIME
life in a way that carries a lifeless undertone, further intensified by the repetition of
movement locking the viewer into a hypnotic cycle with an infinite temporality.
Cinemagraphs as New Media & The Future of Cinemagraphy
The 2011 surge of popularity surrounding cinemagraphy in the artist community
resulted in the development of new methods of creating cinemagraphs through the use of
smartphone technology in 2012. A start-up, Montreal based company called Factyle,
developed a simple application for the iPhone called Cinemagram which allows users to
easily produce and share cinemagraphs. Cinemagram launched as a paid app in February
of 2012, and shifted to a free app once the kinks were worked out in March of 2012
(Popper, 2012). In the six weeks since its release as a free app on iOS, it has added more
than one million users with the biggest markets in the United States, China and Brazil and
tens of thousands of cinemagrams created each day. An Android version is also in
development (ibid.). With the increasing use of smartphone technology and newly
developed tools such as Cinemagram, cinemagraphs are becoming more widely shared
through social media, particularly photo-sharing communities such as Tumblr and Flickr.
The widespread use of this app may even change the terminology used for this medium
from ‘Cinemagraph’ to ‘Cinemagram.’ Cinemagram may be on the same road as the
popular photo sharing app, Instagram, that was recently purchased by Facebook for $1
billion with more than 50 million users and 5 million new users per week (Taylor, 2012).
Though the smartphone technique may not have the precision or quality of professional
work, the temporal nature of the medium remains. The juncture of traditional
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