Animating Still Photos Quickstart With Erick Geisler

In this course, two-time Emmy Award-winning graphic designer Erick Geisler will teach you how to take your still photos and turn them into beautiful animations. We start off with some simple Photoshop basics and then you learn a few easy techniques in Adobe After Effects. In just a few short minutes you will transform still photos into moving works of art.

Project
Animating a Still Portrait

Project
Animating a Still Photo of a Horse

Project
Animating Still Composite Photography

Introduction to Perspective & Parallax
Lets take a minute and quickly go over perspective and the basics behind animating still photography

Separating your foreground object
This lesson starts you off on the easiest of techniques to help you get the movement on still photographs made famous by Ken Burns. Isolating and correcting elements of a photo for animation in Photoshop.

Creating Basic Motion
Importing & animating the elements of a photograph in After Effects as well as exporting it.

Separating your Foreground Object
Masking and isolation of the foreground element in Photoshop & getting in-depth with the photoshop workflow.

Preparing your Background
Creating a version of the background image that alows for motion and parallax.

Extracting Foreground Elements
Extracting even more elements from the foreground for additional animation and depth perspective.

Creating the “Ken Burns” Effect
Importing beginning the animation process in After Effects and setting the project up.

Motion Techniques
Here we are going to get into advanced motion with more depth and adjusting our anchor points to match motion with other elements as well as creating masks and animating additional elements all in After Effects.

Adding Moving Sun Rays
Lets add additional effects and animate them in After Effects so as to increase the effect of motion on our image.

Adding Final Details and Exporting
Now lets finalize our project and add a tiny bit more depth to the overall image and export it for use.

Cutting our Your Main Character
First we begin with cutting out in Photoshop our main focus, the character, the foreground.

Clone Stamping Techniques – Part 1
Now that we have our main subject isolated, we are going to clean up our background layer so as to remove the character completely and have an animatable and movable background layer.

Clone Stamping Techniques – Part 2
Here we continue where we left off in the last lesson and get into additional clonestamp techniques so you get a great result fast taking into account perspective and what we will see in the final product.

Duplicating Elements
Isolating additional elements for parallax and duplicating pieces elements we do have so we can correct what we are missing.

Extracting Perspective Elements – Part 1
Now we are goign to extract even more foreground elemnts to really enchance the 3d motion expiereince.

Extracting Perspective Elements – Part 2
Continuing from last lesson and extracting even more elements in the foreground and background.

Creating Parallax – Part 1
Here we create our After Effects project, import our elements for animation and set up our perspective in our project.

Creating Parallax – Part 2
Adding our final foreground elements in After Effects and finalizing the animation.