Animating still images to look like video

hey this is Mikey with another After Effects tutorial today we're going to be taking some techniques I've taught in past tutorials and putting them all together to make this still picture look more alike actual video let's start with a brand new composition 1920 by 1080 give it a name and this is just 7 seconds long for mine when I bring in my image and it's a rather large image so I'm going to scale this down and what I need to do is I need to separate this out in two different layers I want a grass layer by itself I want to sky layer by itself and then a water layer so that I can animate these all differently so let's start by creating a sky layer so I'm going to duplicate this layer hit Enter or return on the keyboard it makes it so I can change the name of this I'm going to call it sky duplicate it again let's call this water duplicate it again call this grass and let's put the grass above the water and the water above the sky now let's go in and kind of mask some of this out I'm going to first mask out the water layer so I can just solo that hit this little button here with the circle over it that's the solo layer let's grab the mask and I'm going to just do a rough mask I don't have to be too exact because I'm going to feather it a little bit you can of course kit is perfect as you need to and we're just masking out just the water okay perfect now for the grass layer I am going to just mask out where the grass is let's solo that as well and to this I'm going to add an extract filter that's under key extract and what this does is I can extract out based on illuminance or different values you know red green blue alpha but I'm just going to do luminance and bring it down so it's just mostly grass and then we have the sky in the background now to start animating this the first thing I want to do is animate the sky I'm actually going to scale this up slightly about like that let's go to the water layer and feather this mask just ever so slightly about three should do now back on the sky layer I'm going to add to this a distort called CC slant and if we take the floor this is where things slant around and I want to put that right on where the Sun is because I don't want the Sun to move or slant I want it to be kind of where it's at as I select this you can see it creates kind of a cool looking cloud movement why I like about the slant is because the clouds up here at the top which are closer to you are moving faster and further than the clouds down here towards the center let's actually make a move that's just a little bit below the Sun it's okay if the Sun moves a little bit okay so we want to go from probably about 15 and we're going to keyframe at the beginning of the composition or the timeline slant from 15 to negative 15 and what we have is subtle cloud movements okay the next thing we're going to do is let's add some little subtle ripples to the water so with this I'm going to add a ripple effect so go to effect distort Ripple and if we increase the wave wave height be able to see where the ripples are and I want to move the ripple down way down about like that and let's bring the width in and bring the height back down I just want little ripples okay so let's preview that to see if it's the speed we want so I'm just doing a ram preview and that's probably a little bit too fast so we take the wave speed down let's say let's go to point six okay I like that better now what I don't like is how the ripples are affecting the grass they're affecting everything in the picture so let's add a mask to this kind of around the grass and then go out and get most of the water but not these bits of wood that are sticking up through the water about like that and then if we go into the effects under ripple if you're on After Effects CC there's this compositing option we click plus and I'll add a mask to it and we pick mask too so now it's only going to ripple where that mask is now take the grass this grass layer I'm going to move it and kind of maybe scale it up a little bit and to this we're going to add a slant as well under distort CC slant make sure the floor is near the bottom of the grass and we want the grass to kind of move in the breeze like that so what we're going to do is we're going to add to this a wiggle effect so I just hit officer and alt clicked on the stopwatch for slant type wiggle and then put the C's put 1 comma 5 that means every second it'll move a maximum of 5 percent on you know of the slant okay like that so I'm going to duplicate that grass move it over here and let's add a little bit more so if we go into the scale unlink it and turn the first value to a negative number then it will flip the whole thing around it's a little bit of grass down here and this will have a wiggle on it already since I already applied it to the first layer okay so now we've got some Wiggly grass we have some ripples in the water and we have the clouds moving let's add a little bit of stuff to this to make it more like a video like a pan or a zoom or something so if we add a new null object let's go in and parent everything to that null but first what I want to do is take this water layer and I'm going to keyframe the scale let's make sure that the Anchor Point is at the bottom of the layer so I'm going to hit Y to bring it my pan behind tool or it's up here in the top left let's grab the Anchor Point put it at the bottom this is for the water layer go to the end and we're going to scale just the vertical value of this just down a tiny bit so it kind of squashes down like this but it's just the water layer and the grass isn't going to be doing that now let's take the sky layer and we're going to just move the position let's go to the end and move the position down so this is going to give kind of a false parallax feel to it and then on top of that if we take the null and we also scale it from 100 to say 105 then we got a pretty good look let's render this out and see what we look like okay looking pretty good now what I want to add to this is a little bit more brightness to the Sun part of this and what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a lens flare to do that so I want to add this to a new solid just a black solid call it flare and to this let's generate a lens flare and for what I'm doing just the built-in lens flare it will do fine if you are using a third-party plugin then you might be able to get something a little bit nicer but this seems to work fine for this add to this a blur let's just do a fast blur and just horizontally I want to kind of blur this a little bit just about like that now let's take this layer and switch it to add and you can see immediately what it's doing now I want to bring the blend with original up since it's on the black layer if I blend with the original and it's on add it's going to be the same thing as changing the transparency so let's bring that up to about 45 is looking pretty good now I need to keyframe the flare Center because everything moves a little bit and we've got that moving and let's see the difference when I turn that on and off you can see how that adds a nice little brightness to it but it's a little bit white I want to add a little bit more orange enos to it that we had before so since again this is on just a black layer we can go into the effects color correction and add a tint and to the white see we can add this nice yellowy color back into it okay looking pretty good now to the brightness I want to add a wiggle to this as well so it's kind of almost flickering I don't want it to be a fast flicker so let's go wiggle and then just again 1 & 5 so we got a nice subtle kind of adjustment in the brightness and last thing I want to do is help focus your attention on the sunset so let's add a vignette to this so go to layer new adjustment layer to this adjustment layer let's add under color correction an exposure bring down the exposure and then get an ellipse tool mask double click and it'll apply it to that adjustment layer hit F on the keyboard it brings up the feather controls for that mask hit the invert and then feather it and if it's too intense you can also hit T to bring up the opacity bring it down a little bit the idea with the vignette is to make it there but not noticeable and I think we're about done with this let's just do one final render Ram preview to see what it looks like so here's the final product I think it looks pretty good very subtle kind of movements to it I might go in and tweak the the ripple a little bit here and there but all I'm pretty pleased so I hope you learned some great things from this if you have any questions feel free to just post them down in the comments below if it's not even related go ahead and post it in the comments below I do take tutorial requests as well so thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: After Effects Tutorials w/ Mikey

Views: 718,850

Keywords: After Effects tutorials, use, motion graphics, after, how, video production, adobe after effects, after effects tutorial, mikey, effects, to

Id: m90MabRjBCY

Length: 11min 20sec (680 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2015