Who is this lovely lady? https://8ch.net/roze/
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Here's how I made this. This is a video generated from a 2D large resolution picture using after effects CS6 and photoshop CS6.
First the audio. From a song. I decreased the gain of it by 25 dB. Bandpassed it to get rid of frequencies less than 500 Hz and greater than 1500 Hz. The bandpassing is meant to simulate poor quality audio that you'll find on most webcams. Looped a static background noise lifted from one of RT's older videos, about 5 seconds worth. Looped it with premiere pro CS6 but you can do this in audacity or some other audio editor as well. Her editing leaves very little 'downtime' so to speak so it was quite troublesome to find a speechless void in her videos. The music is meant to help cover up the imperfect looping noise and introduce a flavor to the video. I increased the gain of this noise by about 5 dB to exaggerate a little.
Secondly, general video effects. I precomposed the animations/3D effects and applied some general effects to the precomposition talked about in the third part below. First is grain. Then is wobbly camera using wiggle to move the precomposition around a few pixels per second. Also some slight positional and scale keyframe adjustments on the precomposition to make the video less static. What you could do instead of wiggle is get a real video with real, natural instability, track positional keyframes and apply them to your video for a more authentic wiggle.
Thirdly, the effects within the precomposition. This is the heart of the video. In photoshop you can create a transparency layer that you can import into after effects to use as a displacement map. This creates the 3D illusion from a 2D image. Key frame distortion values to create apparent movement. It only works within certain ranges. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbYfx... You can use this same displacement map to apply a camera blur effect that varies with the map to imitate an out of focus camera blur. The animations of the face took the longest time. I used the liquify tool to adjust facial position keyframes to create animations. Within the liquify tool there is a helpful tool that lets you reset edits inside a local area so you have more than just ctrl z to fix things up. When I animated her smile, there were many things that had to be adjusted to get it right. When a human smiles, their lips widen and stretch pulled by muscles in the cheek which distorts the cheek. The nose widens slightly. The upper and lower eye boundaries contract slightly and the eyebrows raise up. It is important not to exaggerate these movements or you'll get unrealistic qualities. Less is more, but I am just an amateur so I could be wrong.
Some final thoughts. This was troublesome to create. I'm running on a i5-2500k@4.4GHz, 8 GB RAM and a GTX 560 Ti and it lagged quite a bit near the end even when previewing on 8th quality or even 16th quality. Render times were about 65 minutes using H.264 15 Mbit CBR rendering. It took me multiple tries in photoshop and after effects to get it adequate, in my eyes.
Do not ask me any questions about the making of this video because I feel my grammar is specific enough such that there is little grammatical ambiguity in what I wrote.
