Flixel app: Create and share animated photos

(EndPlay Staff Reports) - Now that the headlines about Facebook buying photo app Instagram are subsiding, here comes Flixel .

This new iPhone app created by Toronto-based company Flixel Photos allows users to create moving pictures with nothing but a finger. Flixel easily captures moments with Instagram-like aesthetics, allowing users to create short vignettes of time, according to Mashable .

Here's how it works:

• Take two seconds of video footage with your iPhone camera;
• The Flixel app can then turn that footage into a still image;
• Next you can manipulate that image and turn it into a partially animated GIF.
• By rubbing your finger over the parts of the image you want to animate, you create a sort of moving image.

"It's easy, it's fun, and it results in some pretty strange, hypnotic Flixels populating the fledgling photo app's feed," wrote Justin Gilbert in The Huffington Post .

You can download the app for free on iTunes .

Co-founders Phillippe LeBlanc and Mark Homza got the idea from their interest in Cinemagraphs, which are photographs in motion created by artfully isolating certain movements, Mashable reported.

Visual graphics artists Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck created and trademarked the Cinemagraph process. They duo use still and video equipment then make edits using Adobe After Effects and Photoshop. They then present the cross between photography and video in a GIF file.

"What Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg did is completely reformat the GIF format and art form by merging the gap between photo and video," Homza told Mashable. "So they positioned themselves as photographers with an element that is in motion, that's in movement."