Welcome to the first post of my newest blog segment: Top Cinemagram GIF’s.

If you have no idea what that means, let me first explain that I have a new mobile obsession, and by far, it’s Cinemagram. It’s an app on my iPhone 4s that let’s me shoot and edit three second movies into sometimes poignant, often-times ridiculous GIF’s. Before reading any further, you should head over to the App Store and play around with it so you know what I’m talking about.

So. For your time-wasting enjoyment, this is a roundup of the week’s best ones. You might have seen these on my Twitter — I got a nice enough response that I thought a collection was in order.

Case in point:

Above is the first masterpiece (aka “Cine”) I ever created. I think you understand why I loved it immediately. I can’t tell in this one if I look more like I’m just wearing a really accurate Max Goldberg mask, or more like simply no one should ever make out with me. You can tell me either way in the comments.

I’m going to go ahead and call it now and say that this is my favorite images I’ve ever captured. You know how weddings sort of make everyone want to get laid? My cousin Evan got married last weekend to a lovely girl, and this is the drunken wackiness that ensued. If you can think up a name for the dance the girl in the front is doing, leave it in the comments. I’m going to call it, “The Fertility Spiral.”

This is Thomas. He’s the first cat I’ve ever given a chance to be friends with me that actually ended up friends with me. He’s a furry widdle fucker with a bourgeois attitude about drinking water that isn’t running — AKA water in a bowl like every other cat in history. It’s water, you idiot. You will die if you don’t drink it. Alas, I now share a tap with the tongue of an animal that bites mice and licks it’s own asshole.

This one was taken of me by Katelyn Benton. If you stair at this one long enough, your eyebrows will start to ache with empathy pains. One way to describe this picture is, “a healthy dose of skeptical, smarmy sarcasm.” Another is, “I’m literally too stoned to talk in this picture.”

May I present: Chai and Latte. Those are their names. They are two morbidly, adorably obese golden retrievers that you can find at the Pete’s Coffee in Brentwood, CA every Thursday morning. As you can see in this GIF, Los Angeles dogs need sit-ups too, and only get them in retouched images.

Once you’re already in Venice Beach, CA, it doesn’t take much to suddenly feel like there’s a glitch in the Matrix. Sometimes it’s the two hundred person beach drum circle a few yards from a police station. Other times it’s the boardwalk vendors making me feel like an asshole for not getting seven medical marijuana cards. But sometimes, the helicopters are just trippy, maa-aan.

I admit it, I snagged this one from my buddy Tyler Nicholas. It’s particularly entertaining to me that this GIF makes molten sparks fly at Tyler’s nutsack for as long as I decide not to close this window. #SuckItTyler

Wow, I take a lot of animal shots with this app… What is this, Pinterest? (TOPICAL!). Above is Greta, who my group of friends has come to call “Kitty Pig”. Cute as it is already, this GIF is much more entertaining with dubstep in the background. Try it.

Here’s Alex Carpenter, long time buddy of mine, riding in his hoopty, stuck in Los Angeles traffic with everybody else. If you stare at this GIF long enough, it’s better than a lava lamp. Wait, scratch that; if you were born after 1990, I meant to say, “better than the iTunes visualizer.”

Here’s Katelyn, making me both pancakes and happy.

It’s pretty much an awesome app. You can find my Cinemagram and other network profiles on the Contact page.

More posts like this to follow…

M

(Technical geekery below)

PS — One thing that sucks is that you can’t export the GIF’s you’ve spent so much enthusiasm creating — you can only post them. These are my GIF’s, right? I used this app to make a GIF, so I should be able to do what I want with that GIF, right? Sort of like if I make a video in Final Cut, I should be able to do whatever I want with that movie, including export into my preferred filetype…

You can get your files, it’s just a pain in the ass (as of this writing). If you want to get to the raw GIF you’ve just created using Cinemagram, you have to create a small workaround. If you automatically post your images to, say, Twitter, follow the link that was tweeted and then right-click your way to a veritable GIF-o-copia. That’s where the images in this post came from.