Animated Pictures with 3D Timeline using After Effects

This is an introduction of a tribute video I made for my mother's 50th surprise birthday party. This is my second attempt at animating photos for a tribute video (the first one I have posted on youtube was for my brother's 18th birthday). This one adds a whole new dimension with the 3D timeline that I implemented into the sequence.

I am by no means an expert in After Effects and have been teaching myself some of the tricks over the last couple of years. The 3d timeline uses a plug-in called "particular" (which you have to purchase unfortunately), but I found this tutorial http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/colorful_universe/ on videocopilot.net very helpful in understanding how a 3d universe can be created from scratch. I believe you can still download the project files there and mess around with the files yourself.

I have had a ton of people ask me about how to animate photos in this way. Animating photos takes a lot of patience and time, but it can be done. There really is no quick solution. You are essentially superimposing two layers on top of each other and animating the two layers in After Effects using key frame controls for motion. If you have experience with photoshop, you can essentially do the same thing in there and just import the layers into after effects to edit the motion key frames. The problem is cutting out the picture from the background. It takes some patience. However, I've been using the new after effects CS5 and have a new "rotoscoping" tool that you can use (which makes cutting out the pictures that much easier). I also use the "clone stamp" feature which helps create a plain background layer (without any individual in the picture) to animate the cut-out person on.
You can also check out the following website that explains the new rotoscope brush in After Effects CS5.
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/after-effects-cs5-feature-tour/rotoscope-with-rotob...
If you have the new adobe CS5 after effects, this is a video talking about the rotobrush tool that makes it much easier to cut out stills from their background...

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Epic
• Animated
• Pictures
• with
• 3D
• timeline
• using
• After
• Effects

[rapprhyme]

your family must have become happy after watching this

[Maverick51883]

They were excited indeed

[HSSDamian]

This isn't my type of thing, but I must say, it was amazing for me to see how your everything went from retro to becoming modern! Good work with the editing and masking :)

[universalmoor]

aw3som3!