Bringing still images to life using animation. As an integrated designer I always look for ways to utilise my skills to enhance project possibilities and provide additional solutions. Recently I had the opportunity to utilise these skills on some company promotional literature that was to be mailed out to prospective clients.

I was aware that companies have been increasingly moving their promotions into the digital arena through the many available social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. So it made complete sense for me to look at adapting the material to become available through these digital outlets. But rather than simply provide a static image for each of the messages it was important to consider the impact of video content, as according to the Internet Advertising Bureau (Iabuk.com, 2018) it was the fastest-growing online ad format. But how do you bring a still image to life? Well there seems to be plenty of apps out there such as photomirage (Photomirage.io, n.d.) that will create beautiful cinemagraphs out of the static images, but I struggled to see which elements of the images I could animate to make this technique possible or even appealing. In the end I elected to add the motion by focusing on the subject of each image and trying to make the story relevant and as real as possible. Animating the images using After Effects would be my only option, as both Photoshop and the cinemagraph apps wouldn’t provide the level of control or effect I was planning to achieve.

The original Hanson Zandi brochure

Before

After

Apple: The apple was a difficult subject, as the obvious would be to show the apple first without the ‘heart bite’ and then with it, but without have a tacky crunching bite sound to enhance this impression to the viewer it just wouldn’t work. So I decided to take some inspiration from the cinemagraph apps and keep it simple by creating a soft continuous zoom that generates some subtle but elegant movement to the scene.

Before

After

Heart neon light: The first task within this concept simply involved turning the neon light off and then have it switch on, blinking and flickering like an old neon light sign. For me the quickest option and the one that provided the most control for this was to prepare a second ‘off’ state image within Photoshop that I could then switch between the ‘on’ state. In After Effects I switched between the ‘on’ and ‘off’ layers and used a variable wiggle expression to generate the different levels of flickering.

Before

After

Umbrella: This image is all about the umbrella with its strong contrasting bright red against the dark monotone cityscape. All I needed to do was to make it rain! Although I utilised the CC rainfall effect to give the impression of heavy rain, I found it just didn’t provide the level of realism I was after. I had the idea of having droplets running down the screen and started looking at how it would be possible to create this effect in After effects. During my research I came across a fantastic tutorial from the guys at Video Copilot (Kramer, 2017).

Before

After

Leaf: Making a video of a plant growing at speed seems a very difficult challenge without using some kind of time lapse camera, never mind trying to achieve this effect from a static image. By keeping the majority of the animation out of focus disguises the more crude aspects of the animation, but also provides some depth to the scene as the camera navigates its way through the growing plants. A simple mask path with a ‘reveal original image’ set on the keyframe of the stroke was enough to achieve the desired result.

Project Details

Client Hanson Zandi
Date February 2019
Skills Animation, Video

References:

Iabuk.com. (2018). Smartphone video is fastest growing online ad format. [online] Available at: https://www.iabuk.com/press-release/smartphone-video-fastest-growing-online-ad-format [Accessed 12 Aug. 2019].

Photomirage.io. (n.d.). PhotoMirage. [online] Available at: https://www.photomirage.io/en/ [Accessed 12 Aug. 2019].

Kramer, A. (2017). New Tutorial: Realistic Rain Drop FX!. [online] Video Copilot Blog. Available at: https://www.videocopilot.net/blog/2017/01/new-tutorial-realistic-rain-drop-fx/ [Accessed 14 Aug. 2019].

Like what you see