Photographer Jamie Beck has done quite a bit lately to popularize the “cinemagraph“: Harry Potter-esque photos that are given an extra dimension by adding a dash of animation. If you want to learn how to make your own, Photojojo recently published a great tutorial on how to make them using Photoshop. Photographers Fernando Baez and Christopher Mathew Burt have also published tutorials and some helpful tips.
Image credit: Photograph by Jamie Beck
This animation was created by students of the Engineering 128: Advanced Engineering Design Graphics course at UC Berkeley during the Spring 2008 semester. The first part shows a Canon 10D DSLR exploding into its individual parts, and then those parts coming together again to slowly rebuild the camera, while the second part does the same for a Canon 24-85mm lens. Pretty dang impressive considering that it’s for an undergraduate course.
This advertisement might not seem too special or difficult to do at first glance, until you find out that it was done completely in Photoshop.
Our original plan: traditional animation in flash, still art in illustrator. Boy did that change. As we went through look development, everyone was feeling the wonkier hand drawn feel. Goodbye Illustrator. As we talked through the pipeline process with our new animator buddy Ben, he suggests “just do it ALL in Photoshop”. With a flurry of keystrokes, the animation timeline was opened, and we were animating… right there… all in one program. ZOMG. [#]
Did you know that Photoshop is capable of animation? Check out the Window->Animation panel.
(via John Nack)
These ghostly figures you see in these photographs weren’t Photoshopped in, but are purely done through light painting. If you remember the creative 3D light painting technique using an iPad that we shared a while back, Croix Gagnon and Frank Schott took it a step further and put a slightly morbid twist on it. For their project “12:31“, they “painted” using a laptop and an animation showing cross-sections of a human body!
Read more…
Adam Fisher, an animator at Laika, grew out his hair and beard in order to make this neat video in which he gives himself a haircut and shave with only his hands. It’s a creative use of stop-motion, and was made to promote the protection of our natural resources.
P.S. Be careful when playing Fisher Rock-paper-scissors!
(via Laughing Squid)
“Nowhere Near Here” is a creative video by Pahnl that uses light painted stencils for stop-motion animation, following a glowing dog on its journeys around a city. Production took over 300 hours, and involved getting down on the knees to light paint over 200 stencils. Ironically, a dog almost peed on the camera during shooting.
OK Go, the kings of viral music videos, just released their latest video for the song “Last Leaf“. It’s a stop motion video in which individual pieces of toast are used as each frame of the animation. 15 still shots (made with the Samsung NX100) were used for each second in the resulting video, with the final video using 2,430 pieces of toast.
(via Pocket-lint)
This video will blow your mind. We’ve all seen light-painting photos and stop-motion animations created with those photos, but marketing agency Dentsu London figured out how to take light painting a step further using an iPad.
By using all sorts of crazy computer modeling and animation techniques, they figured out how to create 3D light-paintings by playing a “CAT-scan” style animation on the iPad while sweeping the iPad through the air. By repeatedly doing this kind of sweeping with various 3D models, they were able to create 3D light painting stop-motion animations. Here’s how they explain it:
We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation.
Prepare to be amazed.
A big thanks to Jim Goldstein for the tip!
If you were reading PetaPixel earlier this year, you probably remember the jaw-dropping CGI animation titled “The Third & The Seventh“. Here’s another extremely realistic and detailed computer-generated animation that simulates a camera traveling through a classroom (with lens flares and all). It was created by Israel-based Studio Aiko.
The scene was modeled using 3D Max and rendered with V-Ray, and was created over a period of 6 months.
Read more…
Here’s a really imaginative short film called AT-AT day afternoon, created by Canadian filmmaker Patrick Boivin. Boivin took a vintage Star Wars Walker toy and transformed it into man’s best friend. The film was created using a blend of stop-motion animation, puppetry, and clever household green screens that aren’t always green. Boivin, who is self-trained in filmmaking and effects, said in an interview that he shoots primarily with a Canon 5D Mark II.
Check out the behind-the-scenes video below. Read more…
