On my profile, you can see which version I chose out of these two, but I'm curious which one would you choose?

Light hero

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.