Petra Švajger

Petra Švajger is a recent Fashion Design graduate from The Faculty of Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia. While Švajger plans to pursue her masters in graphic design, she currently works as an event photographer. Švajger is a multitalented artist with a distinct quirkiness and edge to her art. Interestingly, she “never really felt like a fashion designer,” noting that her true passions are GIFs, and more recently, cinemagraphs. From digital animation to living photos, Švajger has mastered the art of the short looping video.

How it was made:
Petra loves fashion and most of her cinemagraphs are fashion based. She uses a video recording, and, using image editing software, takes the video frames and makes them into a seamless loop of sequential frames. This is done so that the motion in part of the gif is perceived as a repeating or continued motion, in contrast with the stillness of the rest of the image.

What it deals with:
Much like Jamie and Kevin, she produces fashion based cinemagraphs. However she makes her fashion cinemagraphs look more fine art based because of the way she plays with lighting in the background. Most of her cinemagraphs tend to be in black and white which I think works really well with her subject matter.

How it differs from traditional media:
Gifs have been around for awhile now, and are quite easy to make. Cinemagraphs are a little more complex as there is a lot more editing involved. Cinemagraphs takes the basis of film/photography a traditional art form and brings a modern, interesting light to it. Instead of a mini film with a person stood still as possible, you can edit them to not move and it actually makes it more interesting to look at it.

What equipment, software, approaches, techniques, effects and methods of presentation are used:
Equipment:
  Petra uses cameras, unique lighting and editing software.
Software:
Adobe Premiere and Photoshop
Approaches/Techniques:
  She takes a short video of her subject using a tripod and unique lighting (Flashlights,Fairy lights) to produce footage to use for her cinemagraph. She then cuts the video to how she wants and convert it in to photoshop layers which she can then use in a timeline format to create the gif/cinemagraph. In photoshop she uses multiple touch up tools to make sure the cinemagraph looks pretty and professional.