Putting a still photo into 3D space

[brucep]

I'm halfway through a 16-week class in Adobe After Effects. One of this week's homework assignments was to take this still, two dimensional image,



cut it up in Photoshop, put it into 3D space in After Effects and then move a camera through it. Here's what I came up with: http://youtu.be/Zbs5CWNYaj0

[NoCard]

Very impressive!
Cool (as the young lad said )

[Sage]

Wow, Bruce. That is too neat. If you keep showing us all this cool stuff, we may abandon the still camera and take up videography. ~~Peg

[JimL]

Well done Bruce.

Jim

[anindyanuri]

Very interesting. I need to take a look into it.

[lostinspace]

Very cool Bruce, and especially impressive if you're new to After Effects.

Looks great, but I just wanted to suggest some more tools you can play with for the future of similar projects. This is all stylistic choice here, so I just wanted to point out that I'm not trying to correct your work, rather provide more food for thought. For the last two people you had in the shot you cut off their arm and animated it along a pivot point to make the people wave, etc. Try playing around with the puppet tool in After Effects (which came before the one in Photoshop, but does very similar things). Basically, it turns your image into a mesh which you can then add pivot points to that allow you to stretch, bend etc. your image. By using keyframes in AE you can use this as an Animation tool. If you're interested in playing around, here's a puppet tool introduction tutorial presented by Creative Cow.

http://library.creativecow.net/artic...video-tutorial

Also, if you haven't done it with your class yet, try doing a 3D pan through a 2D hallway image. Look for adobe photoshop vanishing point + after effects tutorials, it's pretty neat!

Happy photographing!
- Rick

[brucep]

Thanks for the suggestions, Rick. I don't care much for the puppet warp tool in AE - If I'd have had time (that was only a small PART of that week's assignment), I'd have articulated elbows and hands, too. The arm movement was kind of a joke reminder of a bit of silliness I put into the previous assignment (which had also been shown to the class by the teacher).

You can see some of the other assignments I turned in that semester here:
http://brucephilpott.com/video/#aftereffects

It was a great class with a top-level instructor and the brightest, most imaginatve classmates I've ever been with. We've stayed in touch and plan to help each other out in upcoming video projects.

[meskun]

You can make that with Photoshop too, but whit After Effect is easier.