Meghan Dower

Exhibited In:

in·position American University Studio Art Thesis Exhibition Spring 2022

April 2022

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Shadows Cinemagraphs 1-3

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For this assignment, I went back and forth between several different concepts only to throw them all out the window when one day in my lower level photo class, we made a cinemagraph on Photoshop. I had never done it before and the one I made in class didn’t turn out well, so I decided to take this assignment as an opportunity to try something completely new. That being said, I used video for the first time in Photoshop with this assignment which proved to be a bit of a struggle. I first had to figure out what types of movement would be best for this kind of video/photo work, so that’s why I did a simple sequence of making hot chocolate. My biggest issue, of course beyond learning how to one simply make a cinemagraph, and two use video in Photoshop, was figuring out how to mask the moving part of the image properly. The way a cinemagraph is made forces you to choose one moving object to loop, which was difficult when you have multiple moving objects like in the GIF of the cocoa powder being poured into the glass. I had particular trouble with that one because, in the full-length video, the packet was continuously being tilted upward, but I only wanted to capture the cocoa falling. With that one, angling the selection of the mask to only include the cocoa was difficult because somehow, there was always a part of the packet moving that I didn’t want. Other issues I had included the crossfade for the looping action being a bit too jumpy or revealing stuff under the mask that I didn’t want. With that in mind, I know my body’s concept isn’t terribly exciting, but I thought it would be worth it in order to learn this new skill and, throughout the process, learn to clean up certain mistakes.