Making experimental films from my holiday photos

August 24, 2016 6:36 AM

I'm really interested in making films/videos/etc from still images - think Chris Marker's La Jetée. I know a bit about photography but not very much about filmmaking. I've been fiddling around in iMovie for a small project, but I would really appreciate recommendations and advice regarding both technique and technology.

I'd be interested in:
1. Books or articles that talk about the use of still images in video beyond just 'Hey! have you heard about the Ken Burns effect?'

2. Discussion of different approaches when it comes to syncing image transitions to music. Although this isn't the only sort of project I have in mind, it's one that comes with its own specific questions. Again, anything beyond 'have you thought about having the images switch on the beat of the music?'. I don't know where to start researching this and I'd really like some pointers.

3. Recommendations for software that might make it easier to produce really interesting examples of this sort of film. I guess part of what attracts me to this as an area is that in theory it's a fairly low-tech way to make interesting films, but I'm also thinking that maybe iMovie isn't the best way to go about this. However, most of the film editing software that's out there is geared towards editing moving pictures, not sequences of stills. I don't really know what I need to be looking out for.

4. I guess in general - how to avoid the 'this is a slideshow my picture software made for me' look.

posted by Acheman to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (3 answers total)

One of my favourite videoclips uses only still photos, in a Ken Burns-on-steroids kind of way. I've done stuff like this on After Effects, and other than pan and scan, it's mostly a lot of color-matching (so that sky blue and snow white used in transitions is always the same), and some well-timed alpha masking. Other videoclip is this one, that morphs similar images, as well as other effects and mixing up video bits here and there, which you can use with the examples on Eple - just extract the first frame of the video and use it to make the transition, and once it seems it's another photo, start playing the video.
Another fun effect is changing the hue very slightly (video, but can be applied to a photo with masking) in a way if one does not pay attention, doesn't even notice it shifted.
By splitting a photo into layers - say, the foreground from the background, you can give some life to photos by moving the front layer around with some parallax scrolling and blurring it slightly while focusing on the background, and so on. I've seen this being used more often on documentaries as the Ken Burns thing kind of became a cheap joke.
With music, one thing I did was using a low-res video (although it can easily be done with a photo with some panning and rotating) and sync up a track to effects on an RGB layer - for instance, the drums zoom in the red layer (I don't remember the rest - one of them rotates the green and other blurs the blue, if I'm not mistaken). The progressively more psychedelic pattern is another video layered on top. Of course, it helps being able to use individual tracks, but with some equalization fiddling, and exporting the same song with different frequencies cut off should give the same effect.
posted by lmfsilva at 10:51 AM on August 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

However, most of the film editing software that's out there is geared towards editing moving pictures, not sequences of stills. I don't really know what I need to be looking out for.

The better video editors (or, at least, Adobe Premiere) will let you edit still images just like a video.

If you want to try something fancier (panning or zooming), Adobe After Effects might be easier to work with than Premiere.

(You can get 30-day trials of both of these through a Creative Cloud account, which you might already have. Watch out: Premiere, like a lot of "creative professional" software, is a bit of a pain to work with without training.)
posted by neckro23 at 2:16 PM on August 24, 2016

If you are on a Mac (which I infer from your iMovie reference) I suggest that you look at fotomagico. While it is a slide show builder, it is on a whole different level, including automatically syncing transitions to the beat of of the soundtrack. You can get pretty creative with it, including layering photos to achieve a 3-D effect. It's also significantly cheaper than many of the alternatives being discussed.

If you are not on a Mac, in the immortal words of Roseanne Roseannadanna, "never mind".
posted by jeporter99 at 4:32 PM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]