This Trippy Blur Lapse Effect Was Created by Stacking Still Frames from Video
“In Motion” is a short film by photographer Aaron Grimes showing the city of Tokyo, Japan. It features a novel, surreal effect that was created by stacking video frames inside Adobe Photoshop and then recombining those stacked frames into a video again.
“The effect was exactly what I wanted: all the motion blurred together,” he writes on the Adobe blog. “The more frames I stacked, the more it blurred. From there, I realized that if I staggered the effect by overlapping frames (for example: 1-24, 2-25, 3-26, etc.), then stacked those, and played it back, I would get the motion that I’ve always wanted.”
The result is an effect that can be described as blurred long-exposure real-time footage.
Grimes says that the project originally took forever to do, as he was creating each frame individually, stacking 24 images at a time. “Looking back it’s almost embarrassing how much time I spent,” he says. “It was excruciatingly slow and I couldn’t even see the final result until hours of work went by. It was a little like editing in the dark.”
He has since partnered with a couple of developers to create a script that does all the stacking with a “push of a button” to create this effect without too much time or effort.
