They are sometimes called “cinemagrams” but really it’s just a fancy word for an animated gif. Gif is an old type of image format made popular back in the 80s that stands for “graphic interchange format” and allows animated frames. The unfortunate part, however, is that it only allows 256 color-spectrum meaning we photographers are severely limited in color gamut when we create these the old fashioned way. I’m no expert, in fact I’ve not really been very interested seeing as how you cannot print a moving picture and put it on the wall, but I do think they have their place in the internet/web world. It’s as easy as shooting video or taking lots of images (with camera on tripod so it doesn’t move) and then select the frames you want to use and mask out the entire background other than the small section of the image which you with to animate. Select your frames, then export into gif format and voila, you have a cinemagram. More on this later.