This is my cinemagraph. It is a video clip that I shot of me and my best friend Gabriella (I call her Gab), who is currently battling stage 4 leukemia. I chose this moment because it was one that truly spoke to me and I felt  was important for me to immortalize. In this moment, I am visiting Gab in the hospital and she grabs my hand. This was a moment very early on in her treatment, when everyone was scared and not knowing what to expect. She had just been put on an oxygen tube with severe lung and heart problems as this had happened, and she was assuring me she was okay by stroking my hand with hers.

I related this cinemagraph to Dr. David Eagleman’s study of why we feel “slow motion” in a crisis. This moment was a similar example, as hospital time often relates to this; time in a hospital, especially in this moment, seemed to be going both too fast and too slow at the same time. Throughout my time visiting Gab, I realized that the large majority of moments were lost to my memory. I was in shock or wanted to repress them from my memory etc. Small personal moments like this became the only ones I focused on and remembered, they seemed to last forever. It seems fitting to immortalize them.

I made this cinemagraph by importing a video clip into photoshop as frames, and following the instructions we learned in class to turn it into an endlessly repeating loop. I edited the lighting and colors of the photo to make it seem softer and more nostalgic, with cool tones to make it seem somber.