How is this technique achieved

[Shane Ross]

AHhhhh…the “Kid Stays in the Picture” effect. There was a movie that was all stills, and they did it this way.

This is achieved by using Photoshop to cut out the foreground elements (duplicating the photo file, or having it in a separate layer) and then animating them with After Effects. You might be able to do this with FCP, as it is a good compositor…but I have only done it with After Effects. Boris Effects does this too.

Yes, you keyframe the movement.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[Shane Ross]

After watching this more closely, they DEFINATELY used After Effects or Boris for this. And they did a LOT of planning and work here. Might have layered photos of people with the same location devoid of them (they might have shot this too).

VERY well done. I don’t think you will get this level of manipulation with FCP.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[Gary Alan]

you also need to move the cutout image foreward in 3D space so the AE camera moves around to simulate the look of depth

Gary

[Ernie Santella]

It looks like they went into Photoshop and cut out the elements and then in After Effects or FCP re-layered them. When they are still images they are usually very large, so there’s plent of room to zoom/move on them. The one tricky part is they may have cloned some of the background to remove the people.

Ernie Santella
Santella Film/Video Productions
http://www.santellaproductions.com

[David Roth weiss]

Its very easy to do… NOT!!!

If you have a few spare months to experiment you can achieve some nifty results. BTW, this is much easier to do in Combustion than AE, simply becasue Combustion’s rotoscoping tools are superior.

[Lee Berger]

Just cutting the people out of the background is the most labor intensive part of the project.

[Gary Alan]

tghe new CS3 PS makes it easier with some new tools for creating the cutout

[Chris Poisson]

Hmmm,

I disagree David, this is not hard to do at all, it’s just laborious. This is a very well done piece, overdone perhaps, as a lot of the movement has been aided by moving the layers, not just the camera, something I often do to help this effect. I can’t imagine how this person makes this economically viable for his clients, they either have a lot of money or time or both. But I suppose if the guy plans these out well, and shoots a bunch of these foregrounds on greenscreen, then maybe it’s not so expensive. At least that’s the way I’d do it, or go insane with all the masking.

[David Roth weiss]

Chris,

I think we’re actually in agreement here… Its very time intensive. The difficult part is that every one of the scenes in this type of work usually requires a completely different concept as determined by the objects in the frame and the background. I too have a difficult time imagining how this can be done within the constraints of a small budget. Perhaps its done on just one shot in every wedding video, as the hook this guy uses to differentiate himself from all the others in the Yellow Pages who do the same thing???

DRW

[Matthew Mcnulty]

there is a tutorial on richard harringtons site rhedpixel.com… nice technique… a pdf i think
yes time instensive.. but looks fantastic…