Animated Still Photos: 4 ways to do it in After Effects

hey this is Mikey and this After Effects tutorial I want to show you four ways to make pictures move now these four ways are using one the displacement map to the puppet pin tool three separating the layers into Z space and four with the vanishing point from Photoshop let's start with the puppet tool so here I have a new composition I'm just going to delete these two layers I have there and I'm going to bring in the photo I have and this is just from this is just a stock photo a simple handshake now if you've ever done any sort of video for client work I'm sure you've used a handshake at least once in your life it's one of these classic shots that everyone uses a lot now I'm going to be using the puppet tool and if you haven't used the puppet tool it's this pin right here or if you just hit command P on your keyboard I'm going to click that and what the puppet tool does is it moves things around very organically and it's a good way of animating a still photo so what I want to do for this shot is to I want to put a pin right here on the arm 1 right here on that arm and then 1 right in the middle and as I move this you can see that it looks like they're shaking hands now the problem I have as you can see is right here this is not lining up quite right and you can see an edge there so there's a couple things I can do I can scale this up so it's bigger or I can also come in here and put some more pins down on these points so it won't move like that and then when I animate this it's going to look it's not going to move off the edge now it might still have to scale it a little bit so what I want to do now is let's animate this handshake so if I come down into this puppet tool in the timeline and go into mesh go into deform and I can switch which pin these are and as I highlight them it's going to tell me which one right there pin puppet pin number three is the pin that I have highlighted so I just now need to keyframe this it's our Tiki friend when I put the puppet tool on so I'm going to go forward in time let's bring it up forward a little bit more bring it down forward bring it up and then bring it back down now let's just take a look at that and that is entirely too slow and so when you do an animation and you find it way too slow then all you have to do is just highlight all these keyframes and I'm going to hold down alt or option on my keyboard and I'm going to kind of scale them together and then what that does is it's going to equally scale them and it's a quick way of scaling things together now now that I have the animation that I like I'm just going to come into this layer and I'm going to scale it up a little bit there's a little bit of black right there so again I can either scale this up or I can create a new solid let's grab this eyedropper make sure it's the same color as the background and let's put it in the background and that should fill that in so that is using the puppet tool and it's really kind of simple straightforward and a really good option to create some moving pictures next let's talk about displacement map now this one's a little bit more difficult so let me I'm using this picture here it's called the Mona Lisa if you haven't heard of it and I'm going to take and create a displacement map and make this look 3d and give some nice movement to it now to do this you have to create kind of a depth map black and white of different varying levels and the easy way to do this is you can do this right in After Effects let me I'm going to show you how to kind of get started and then I'm going to fast forward as I create the depth map and you can see what the finished product looks like so I'm going to take this just duplicate the layer so I'm not doing it on the original and here I have the duplicated layer let's just go ahead and give that a name I hit enter on the keyboard just call it depth map and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my paintbrush and I'm going to double click right on the layer and I have right now it's set at a really large diameter I can bring that down over here and what I want to do is just paint right on top of the Mona Lisa some black and white so I want to start with black and I also have the opacity set about 74 and that's fine and so what I want to do is I want to take the most closest to the camera points and I want to color those black and the parts that are furthest away I want to color white so let's start with we can see down here these hands are going to be kind of black and I'm just going to color them and maybe this arm right here I can bring this diameter up go like that and then as I kind of move a bit back in away from the camera I'm going to get to more of a gray and you don't have to be exact because of the way this the plug-in that I'm going to use works it doesn't require you to be exact because we're just going to do some subtle movements then come in here and let's change this to a little bit lighter or gray okay so I got this painted and it's looking pretty scary I can imagine but we're going to the reason why I just did it kind of transparent is because what I want to do is let's go back into out of paint mode and so it's kind of in a paint mode and I come over here click on composition get back into this and I'm going to come in and I'm going to add an effect I'm going to go to color correction and tint I'm going to tint this black and white and I want some of this a little bit of a detail still left in there but it's mostly black and white now what I can do is I'm going to take this depth map and I'm going to pre-compose so that's command shift C if you're on a Mac and I'm going to move all attributes and let's call this depth comp click OK and I'm going to just move this to the bottom let's and let's hide that now on my main layer that I'm going to create to look 3d I'm going to highlight that I'm going to go to effect distort displacement map and mainly you can see that it's starting to do some some weirdness but I'm going to go in here where it says displacement map layer and I'm going to select depth comp and let's take these horizontal and vertical displacement and move it to 0 and you can see as I move it kind of creates a 3d look now it's a little bit extreme so what I want to do is I want to go in that now I can say ok as I do this the eyes definitely aren't matching up quite right so what I need to do let's come back into this depth comp bring up my paint brush make it a little bit darker okay now let's see what that looks like that's going to fix it right there pretty much also something else I can do is to kind of soften the way that this this depth map looks is I can come in here to to this depth map and I'm going to duplicate that I'm going to take the bottom layer I'm going to take off the paint this top layer I'm going to set to transparent and then I can come into the effects add a blur let's just add a fast blur and I can blur this and it kind of is going to make everything a little bit more messy together I can also adjust the opacity to kind of basically I want a kind of a black and white image where the things that are closer are going to be darker the things that are further away are going to be lighter let's go back into this and let's that's starting to look better and there we go so what we do now is I'm going to keyframe the horizon distance and the vertical distance and let's go forward a few seconds about two seconds and let's just move it subtly and then maybe go back at the beginning and let's go kind of backwards we go about four frames four pixels before it starts to look funny and of course I'm going to also need to come in here and let's scale this up so my edges don't turn black and it's just some very subtle movement but it adds kind of a nice 3d effect to the picture to the Mona Lisa so that's number two which was using the displacement map and again how we did that as we created kind of a just a makeshift depth map out of using the paintbrush just did something really quick I just wanted a subtle movement and I think that did the trick now the next thing I want to show you is separating out layers with Photoshop and of course with that we need Photoshop so I'm going to bring up Photoshop and this is not a Photoshop tutorial this is an After Effects tutorial so I'm not going to show you how to separate everything out it'll take a long time to do that but I will show you you don't have to be perfect so let me just show you this is my back layer here this is just some more stock photos I found then here is my middle layer and here's my front layer the front layer is just the car with some grass the middle layer is just the couple sitting there in the back layer I had to kind of I masked out some of this and copied some of the grass over now what I am going to show you this is just the original photo and I just left that there just in case but I am going to go in and let's name these layers here sokar couple background and then I can save this and then when I take that file and I'm going to just drag it and drop it right into my project window so here's my project window I'm going to drag and drop the full of the file from my just from my window bring it in and it's going to ask me import kind composition footage or retain layer sizes I want to do composition if you do footage then it's going to flatten everything down you won't have the layers and click OK now when I go into this you can see here my layer names stayed the same color couple background so that's how you format something from Photoshop when you bring it into After Effects it's just the layers in Photoshop turn into layers for After Effects so let's take a look at this what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring a new camera and just the default settings should be just fine and then let's turn these layers 3d and then I'm going to come into this active camera and I'm going to move it to a custom view and what this does is I can kind of see what my camera is looking at now I'm going to come in here I'm going to take where is the car and then it brings up these little arrows here I'm going to hold down V or hit V to bring my selection arrow and I can move this car forward and then click on the background and move the background away and then what we've done here is we've made it so they're separate alright so let me go back into my active camera and I need to kind of format these so the car is now much much too large so I'm going to scale that down until it fits back in the frame like it did before and the background is also much too small so I'm going to scale that up so it fits in the background like it did before now with bits formatted like this or setup like this you can see I can move now around and it's got a bit of a 3d look to it so let's scale this to fit and I'm going to just I'm going to do a little bit of a zoom so I'm going to go into my camera settings I'm going to transform and I'm going to just keyframe everything because I don't know if I'm going to zoom it or rotate it just to be safe I like to keyframe everything let's go forward two seconds and to change your camera tools I'm hitting C on the keyboard so this one with the arrow on the top and the bottom it's a dolly forward and then maybe I'll do a little bit of a rotate as well and then you can see that that adds some nice movement to this picture and it looks pretty realistic now other things you can do is you can start adding things together for instance with this picture I can take now the couple and let's add some puppet tools puppet pins just to the couple so let's pin them really good down here on the bottom but then what I want to do is I'm adding some pins on their shoulders and ones on the tops of their heads and as we move forward let's have them kind of lean together like they're they're cuddling up let's take a look at that okay so that adds some really nice movement to this picture pretty simple to do and I think it's a really great effect now the last thing I want to show you is called vanishing point and again this takes Photoshop to do it and if you've got After Effects most likely also have Photoshop because they kind of come together but what I've got here is this big room and I just I got it off of Wikipedia Commons and there's lots of photos on there that are just for everyone to use and it's a technique called vanishing point and not a lot of people really know this it really teaches technique and so how you do it is in Photoshop you click up here to filter and you go to vanishing point and what it is is it creates kind of this nice perspective grids that you can create so I'm going to just click back here in this back corner and I come up to a place where I know where I could create a nice square and the thing is is if it's not square see it's not going to work see where it's red that means it doesn't work so I need to make it blue and that means everything is in perspective and then when I have this grid down here I can hover my mouse over this end and I can extend it out now I want to create the rest of this room and so what I do as a hold down command on a Mac and then I click on this end piece this little box and then it creates another grid that's ninety degrees to that grid and then I just keep on doing this to kind of build my walls and that's really it I've got these just these walls right here now most people at this point they say okay I'm done so they're going to click okay that's not what you do now if you don't know what you're looking for there's actually a tiny little menu right here up here in the left hand corner and I'm going to click on that and it says export for after-effects click OK put it in a folder and let's call this big room and it's thinking a little bit click ok we're done now let's hide Photoshop let's come into file import and right there I don't even know if you even noticed that before vanishing point let's click on that and let's go to and find my file click open and it's going to bring it right into after fix as a composition now if I double click on this it's actually a little bit kind of crooked but don't worry because they've given you some things to work with like for instance this parent if I hit R on my keyboard it brings up all the rotation values and I can straighten this out there's also a camera and so I can kind of move around and I can move in and out and it's really just kind of a cool look by taking this still photograph and making into a 3d room I can kind of create some really nice images here so those are my four ways that I personally like to create moving images from still pictures so as a quick recap first we use the puppet tool as in this example here with the hand shake then we used the displacement map which is a little bit more complex as this example in this very subtle 3d movement of the Mona Lisa then we separated out the layers in Photoshop and we actually combine that with the puppet pin to create this look right here and if you remember we have these all separated out into Z space and then the last one was using the vanishing point filter in Photoshop now if you have any questions I know this is a lot of information in this tutorial but hopefully you picked up some great tips on something you can do in your next project when you know it requires taking a still picture and making it move happens all the time I can't tell you how many times I've done this for client work where they say hey I've got just this picture can you make it move and I say yes I can and then I use one of these techniques so I hope you enjoyed the tutorial make sure that if you have any questions just put them below in the comment section thanks for watching

Channel: After Effects Tutorials w/ Mikey

Views: 397,063

Keywords: parallax scrolling, After Effects tutorials, use, how, to, video production, photoshop, motion graphics, ae tutorials, after, adobe after effects, ae tutorial, アフターエフェクト エフェクトlearn after effects, animating photos, online video training, after effects tutorial, After Effects Classes, mikey, mograph, effects

Id: D7kfx55ci8A

Length: 20min 33sec (1233 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 25 2013