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Back in 2016 I made a lot of cinemagraphs for HBO.
They took a surprising amount of work. Masking footage, finding the right loop, freezing parts of the frame and getting everything to transition cleanly.
I’ve had an idea for a simpler cinemagraph tool kicking around in my head ever since.
About a month ago I built another small tool using Toolcraft as the starting point, so yesterday I wanted to see if it could handle this idea too.
A few hours later I had a working cinemagraph editor.
Drop in a video → find your loop → choose how it loops → paint the areas you want to keep still → export.
Basically the workflow I used 10 years ago, condensed into a few controls.
Still rough around the edges, but kind of wild to finally build a tool I’ve been thinking about for a decade.
The masking-and-looping history is exactly why a simpler cinemagraph workflow feels valuable; the tricky part is preserving a seamless transition without making the tool feel like a timeline editor. Curious direction for an AI-assisted app.
I'm working on adding a visual preview of start and end frames so it's easier to make a perfect loop. Not sure about the viability of the app actually - cinemagraphs are not really a thing anymore, now everything is about shortform content instead, so this is mostly a project for myself I think.
the purple clip looks cool
Really cool idea turning a workflow that used to take hours into a few simple controls is impressive. Love the “finally built the thing I’ve been thinking about for 10 years” part.
a working editor a few hours after picking the idea back up is wild
The Toolcraft framework did a lot of the hard work and I already knew what I wanted because I've made 100s of cinemagraphs in After Effects so the concepting phase was fairly straight forward.
The design looks awesome. Great project!
A start/end frame preview sounds especially useful for seamless loops.
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