Cinemagraph

Everything in the frame is frozen except one thing, which keeps moving. Steam off a cup in a still room, hair moving on a motionless face, a flag on a stopped street.

The eye goes straight to the one live element and stays there. Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg named the form in 2011, and it has been used for held attention ever since.

Shoot from a locked camera, then freeze the whole frame and restore movement inside a mask around the one element. Anything crossing that mask boundary has to be still on both sides of it.

The camera has to stop too. A drift, a breath of handheld, a slow push, any of them break the freeze and turn the shot into ordinary footage with a strange stillness in it.

It usually loops. That means the moving element returns to where it started, which is why steam, water, flame and fabric work and a person walking does not.

Use it for a held title card, a product on a shelf, an atmosphere shot that has to hold the eye for longer than a still would.

Skip it when anything has to develop. Nothing progresses in a cinemagraph, so a beat that needs to change has nowhere to go.

A freeze-frame stops everything, including the element you care about, and it is usually a punctuation mark inside a moving sequence. A cinemagraph keeps one thing alive and holds that state for the whole shot.

The test is whether anything is still moving. Nothing moving is a freeze-frame. One thing moving is a cinemagraph.

The whole frame keeps moving a little, because stillness is unusual in generated video. Say everything is completely frozen and name the single element that is not, as the note asks.

The second failure is a camera that drifts. State that the camera is locked off with no movement of any kind.