Easily make your cat jump cat jump cat jump with Cinemagram
Who can resist those short little movies (gifs) where somebody’s demented cat leaps 10 feet straight into the air to attack the ceiling fan pull — over and over and over? You know your baby / dog / boa constrictor is every bit as talented as that cat, but you never knew how those people made those movies. Well, now you have Cinemagram, which makes gif-making in a jiff possible for ordinary people like you and me.
To make your gif, tap the capture icon at the bottom of the screen, and press and hold the big hold to record button. Note that you can tap the lightning bolt for light, and the arrows to flip to your front-facing camera to film your own face if you must. You can also import a video from your camera roll and clip it easily. The app records for three seconds, and that video is looped for the over-and-over effect.
Wiley (my little shelter mutt) perked up his ears when I said his name and sat very still and wagged his tail for his first ciné. (Such a good boy.) Once the video is made, you can add filters for different effects (I chose the one that made my icky old carpet look the least disgusting). You can adjust the speed up or down (I put this French girl walking in slow-mo because being that graceful on 5-inch stilettos deserves the proper respect). The mask section lets you erase parts you don’t want to move (that you’ll have to test on your own, it all seemed rather messy to me).
When you save your ciné, you can share it various places, like Twitter or e-mail. You can also do that after it’s published. If you tap Cancel instead of Save, you can save the gif to your camera roll without publishing it in your feed.
Your profile page shows all your cinés. If you tap the list icon (next to the video camera icon), you see your cinés one after the other rather than in a grid. At the bottom of each ciné are your commenting, liking, sharing, resharing (sharing somebody else’s ciné in your feed), etc. options.
Cinemagram is a social app that operates pretty much like Instagram, and it’s got some great artsy potential. I signed in with a Twitter account because I was feeling lazy, but then Cinemagram instantly followed all my Twitter “friends” who are using the app, which I found a bit aggressive. Most of my Twitter friends are professional contacts or total strangers, not chums and buddies and BFFs…
So maybe you should start by creating your account with your e-mail address and decide who the hell you want to follow all by yourself, thank you very much.
Devices: iOS (and Android in a few days!)
Cost: Free
Cinemagram on the App Store
