We covered the release of Plotagraph last year as an innovative, algorithm-based tool for bringing your still images to life. The developers have been busy updating the platform and have evolved it into a freestanding app and social media platform dedicated to the creative use of their proprietary form of the cinemagraph, the plotagraph.
The mobile app experience is designed to make it incredibly easy to animate your images wherever you've captured them, create a portfolio of your dynamic content, and share them with other Plotograph users.
Two features that stand out as being particularly interesting are the open network for sharing and the gamification of pricing. Open sharing means it's built with native tools for pushing your content to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social platforms. While this is a common feature, it's not one you frequently see when a company is simultaneously trying to grow their own social platform, and it's nice to see here.
Of course, since your animations can be ported to a variety of places, Plotagraph needs a reason to keep users on its platform, and it has found it by gamifying tools in the software. As you gain more followers in the social community, you unlock tools such as masking in the application, which provides a motivation for users to focus on growing their Plotagraph followers in addition to using the app to push content to other platforms.
Full disclosure: Plotagraph volunteered to animate an image to use as a demo in this post, thus I myself did not animate this image. That is me carrying the camera case and ditty bag.
Why is this useful to filmmakers? The application remains a solid and evolving tool for adding life to a still image, which can work for turning stock shots into dynamic establishers when you don't have the time or budget to source something else. But, beyond that, Plotagraph is focusing on the creation of very short moving images and making that process as easy as possible for users. Excercising your creativity with stylized animations can work as an end to itself, and the combination of tools and optical algorithms in Plotagraph make it an easy entry point for creating dynamic images.
The tool is being used for marketing major motion pictures, and creating dynamic movie posters to stand out on social shouldn't be strictly the domain of big budget productions. In the end, we're filmmakers, and thus we should have moving posters, movement in our Instagram feeds, or at least we should have dynamically moving Facebook backgrounds, which is of course an output supported by the Plotagraph app.
Plotagraph + is available now on the Plotagraph site, and in the App store for iPad, and will launch soon for iPhone.
