Cinemin is a fun camera app with animated film aesthetics without any AI

Tinrocket, makers of popular apps such as Waterlogue and Olli, has released a new camera app called Cinemin to shoot animated photos and videos without the help of any AI filters.

The app, available for free, uses inspiration from traditional animated art and films for its filters. You can apply the filters while capturing the images or videos to see the live preview. Once you snap a picture, you can edit the image using settings such as line cleanup, shadows, flatness, brightness, tint, dark color, light color, temperature and contrast.

For videos, the app has a full-screen cinema mode so you can shoot your footage without any distractions.

Cinemin also offers in-app purchases to unlock features such as saving unfiltered photos and videos to edit later and exporting videos in 3K and 4K resolutions. Users can pay $0.99 per month or $5.99 per year to unlock these features. The app also offers a one-time purchase option for $9.99.

John Balestrieri, the founder of the company, said his background is in art & design. So he tries to incorporate that into his apps. Cinemin focuses on the 2D animation aspect of shooting, so a lot of images and videos will look flat.

“For the past 20+ years, I’ve used computer graphics to explore art and vision. Each of my apps (Percolator, Waterlogue, Cinemin, etc.) focuses on some visual or aesthetic principles grounded in the human visual system backed by hundreds of years of art tradition,” he told TechCrunch over email.

While a ton of apps are applying generative AI-based tricks on photos, Balestrieri said that it needs a lot of training data, and he doesn’t want to exploit artists by using their existing work for AI.

“Generative AI is great if you don’t know what you’re doing — dump in a million pictures and have the computer ‘figure it out’ — but figuring it out for myself is part of my art journey,” he said.