Animated Gifs Made Easy With MotionGraph for Android

An example of a GIF created with Motiongraph

Earlier in the year I wrote about Sony’s Million Moments, an app that sort of struck me by surprise with its smart design. The same Sony subsidiary which developed that application, SDNA may have just topped its previous effort with one of the more clever photo apps I’ve seen in a while.

Released just last week, its new Motiongraph application lets you capture moving scenes and create animated gif files with your Android phone. It could be a subtle hand movement, or some water pouring into a glass. The idea is that most of the image is static, but a portion of it is moving.

So how exactly does it work? The folks at SDNA showed me a demo, whereby you capture a few seconds of video which includes motion in a restricted area of the scene. The app simply requires you to indicate which area it is to animate by filling it in with your finger. Ideally the motion you are capturing should be ‘loopable,’ and the app does have some capacity for detecting looped motion. Check out the demo video below to see exactly how the process works.

Motiongraph is a paid application, currently priced at 104 yen on Google Play (99 cents for those in the US), but if you spend any time sharing images on Reddit, it might be a good investment!

So far the app looks to be doing well on the charts, breaking into the top ten of top grossing Android apps in Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Italy. Give it a try and let us know what you think!