Cinemagraphs
These are being made by Jamie Beck (photographer) and Kevin Burg (motion designer) from NY.
One of their models describes the technique as "more than a photo, but not quite a video."
Very interesting idea to capture a moment of time, without the freeze of a still photograph.
That could be something to explore to give some life to our renders, and animate just a small element in the scene, without the need to make a full video.
Imagine a slight breeze in dcm's curtains, living bubbles in godzilla's glasses, or a moving background in enslaver's abstractions...
Basically you would just have to render the animation for the moving part of the image, and composite that later in Photoshop.
Okay, maybe the gif format has some colour limitations that could kill the render a bit, but they apparently used some magic on their images to keep a very convincing quality!
Quite a challenge.