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Interesting stills treatments?
Hello everybody
Has anybody got any ideas for presenting some stills in a sequence? It’s for a montage of archive stills, to run in between some PTCs. The shots are b&w, a couple of people and a couple of buildings. They’re not really big enough to fill the frame – with one the resolutions too low, and with the others the composition’s wrong, so they need to have some sort of background.
I can’t quite work out the best way to do it, and would appreciate a springboard!
Thanks
PJ
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3 Replies
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You can duplicate the photo, layer it underneath, make it larger and defocus it some. Or you can make a paint background larger than your frame size and move it slowly underneath the stills, creating some motion that way.
Keep the focus of any layer moving underneath the area of interest soft and the movement subtle.
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That’s a common method that Alan mentions, and it works.
B&W shots can be blown up larger than color ones and still look sharp, especially if you play with the gamma.
Another one I like is to create a tableux scene and put the graphics within the tableaux. Say, for example, the photos are of a firefighter. Make a tableaux of props of fire-fighting gear; boots, turnout coat, helmet, maybe a hose nozzle, stuff like that… Set up the shot, light it nice, and you can add a monitor in that scene that shows the shots, or you can project the shots across the scene, or make them look like a sequence of frames the camera pans across… whatever your imagination, time, and budget allow.
Multiple picture-in-picture effects can also be used, kind of a Mondrian look, where you blow up multiple, detailed but oddly-cropped sections of the still and layer these to make up a larger image.
You can also try to use creative cropping thru the use of objects as masks, as well as cutting up the photo in photoshop, breaking it into layers, addigng extra elements, and animating the layers.
You cna also try to increase the picture’s apparent size by using something like the Genuine Fractals plug-in.
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I like to cut out key parts of stills and scale them differently than the background to give a nice 3D perspective.
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