Cinemagram

» see cinemagr.am as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Cinemagram was an iphone app for making a very specific thing: a cinemagraph, a still photo where one small region keeps moving, a flag rippling or steam rising off a coffee while everything around it stays frozen. It arrived in 2011 out of a montreal startup called factyle, built by temo chalasani and marc provost, and for a stretch of 2012 it was one of the most novel toys in the app store. The growth was steep enough that menlo ventures led an $8.5 million round late that year.

Then the format changed under it. Vine launched in early 2013 with six-second looping video and took the oxygen out of the whole short-clip corner of the app store. Cinemagram answered by shipping its own vine-style looping video, on android too, and trying to be the thing that was beating it. That is a hard trade to win, and it did not win it. By the time instagram added video in june 2013 the outcome was set.

Cinemagram was an iphone app first, and in 2011 i was not an iphone person. i watched this whole cohort from ankara through the tech press, the same way i watched socialcam and viddy: american apps racing each other into a format that instagram and vine would take anyway. The clever part was real. A cinemagraph is a genuinely nice trick. The business underneath it was a race nobody in this group finished.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

What made cinemagram spread was that it did something hard and made it feel easy. Cinemagraphs before this were a photoshop exercise, hours of masking a still frame against a short loop of video. The app collapsed that into a few taps on a phone, and the results looked good enough to post. For most of 2012 that novelty carried it, and the funding treated it like the next photo-app breakout.

~ the slide ~

The problem was that the novelty was a feature, not a company. A cinemagraph is a thing you make a few of and then stop making, and the app had to keep finding a reason to be opened. The pivot to looping video was an attempt to become a habit instead of a trick, but by then vine owned the habit and had twitter's distribution behind it.

~ what it became ~

There was no announcement, no shutdown notice, no date to carve. The app simply stopped mattering, the users left for vine and instagram, and the company deadpooled. The cinemagr.am domain ended up parked and for sale. What survived is the word itself, which people still use for the effect, usually without knowing there was once an app that owned it.

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