TAZM PICTURES

Given that the current hot topic in home videography is “home 3-D movies” (both camcorders and screens to view them) I thought it would be appropriate to attempt making some 3-D on the “cheap.”  Really cheap.

I got the idea from Ashton Kutcher – actually, a video he posted in the Nikon Festival contest.  If you look closely at the stills in his video, you’ll see what’s known as the “parallax effect.”  In other words, an object in the foreground moves in relation to the background – simulating the changing position of the viewer / camera, and adding a bit of a 3-D effect.  The idea is that if you move your vantage point from right to left, objects nearer to you will shift to the right more quickly than distant objects.  Apparently it’s useful in astronomy, as in when you’re measuring distances between stars and galaxies.

I wanted to take a collection of stills I had turned into a slideshow some time ago and see if I could create a parallax effect without having the equipment – and staff – Ashton Kutcher likely has available to him.  And here is what I ended up with:

while you were sleeping… from Tom on Vimeo.

As you can see I did not apply the effect to every still.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  And sometimes it seems like it should work, but due to operator error (failure to accurately imagine how moving a virtual camera will affect the scene) makes the whole effect kind of cheesy.

But here’s the basic idea.  You take a photo that has clearly defined foreground objects, maybe also some mid-range objects, and some far-off background.  If it’s difficult to cut out, like bare tree branches, skip it.  Ditto if there is a sunburst effect that overlaps your foreground objects – it’s too hard to separate.  These silhouettes in the video I did seem to work pretty well.

Using photoshop or photoshop elements, use your magic lasso to “cut out” the foreground objects.  Create a new layer from your clipboard, and save it as a GIF file.  You’ll lose some color detail by doing this, but as far as I know it’s the only way to allow transparency – which you’ll need in order to see the background.

Now go back to the background and delete what you just cut out.  You’ll notice you have some dips and jags where there is white space.  You’ll need to fill these in somewhat, because when you move your perfectly fitting foreground in relation to the background, these gaps will show up.  So use the clone stamp tool – again, using a sky background makes this easier – and use similarly colored sky areas to gradually close up your gaps as well as you can.  Basically you’re looking for an overlap between your foreground and background so you can move things around without opening up white space.

Now you go to your video editor.  The background photo will be your first timeline.  Now import your foreground photo(s) and put them in the second, third timeline(s) as appropriate.  The first thing you’ll need to do is adjust sizes so that the original photo has been recreated.  You may want to fudge a little and make your foreground a little bigger – say 105% – to give you more wiggle room.

Now you need to animate the clips.  You have to decide how your camera is going to move.  Left to right?  Simultaneously zooming?  You may want to focus on a particular feature of your photo, as if the camera is moving forward alongside that object.  And you may want to draw a diagram for yourself.  But as a simple example, if you move your camera from right to left, everything in your scene will move left to right.  So you’ll want to give yourself room to do that by increasing the size of your photos and letting a little hang out the left side of the frame.  If using premiere or premiere elements, you then adjust your “x” coordinate at the beginning and end of the clip (using edit effects and clicking on the little clock icon on the appropriate effect).  You want objects close to you to move more than objects farther back.  So a bush may move 25 pixels left to right, and the sky in the background may only move 5 pixels.  Then you have to check and recheck to make sure (a) it looks natural and (b) there are no gaps created during the movement.

To get the hang of this, you’ll need to experiment.  The clip above was my first attempt, and let’s just say it took WAY too much time to create what you see.  Try adding zooms along with your pans and the issue becomes much more complicated.  But I think it’s a cool effect, and well worth learning, if only it helps you understand how parallax works in order to assist you in framing future shots and projects.  Good luck!

As I weathered the worst storm to hit Washington, D.C. in years (they’re calling it “snowpocalypse”!) I thought about a video I made the last time I was in our nation’s capital.  There was much less snow on the ground that time; it was just a few days after President Obama’s inauguration, and the city seemed eerily silent – a stark contrast with the crowds and activity I had seen on television just days before.  Row upon row of porta-johns were lined up on the national mall, and only a few solitary runners and the hardiest tourists were out there with me.  I passed the workmen scrubbing the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial, and was startled to see a huge red-tailed hawk perched on one of the pedestals along the stairway.  I wish I had taken more photos – another guy was there with one of those lenses that look about a foot long, snapping away.  Anyway, I wandered around and took advantage of the quiet to get some impressions of the city, and later that evening took a drive around town as a light snow began to fall again.

I put the images I gathered into a short video / slideshow, which you can see below, but that’s not what this post is about.  Instead, I’d like to share how I did the last few images at the end, which combine several images on top of each other, overlaid with a burning – or rather “unburning” credit, and using chroma key (aka “green screen”) technology.  The video below contains the first version of that effect, which you can watch if you have about a minute to spare.

About a year later, I modified the video to enter it in the Lonely Planet’s “My Journey” video contest.  No, I didn’t win.  This guy did–> (with a pretty cool video!).  I added some text, and my friend Dan Cooper and I put together a combination of some public domain patriotic music, and I redid the final credit.  Take a look at that version below (fast forward to the last 20 seconds or so if you want) and I’ll explain how it was done.

Washington DC – My Journey from Tom on Vimeo.

OK, it starts with the image of the hot dog stand at about 1:35 where I give the music credit.  Then, on a separate track, I added another still with a lot of blue sky, and used the chroma key function of Premiere Elements 7 (but many editing programs have it).  Some programs will guess which color you want to make transparent, but in this case it’s best to indicate you want to choose the color (else your program may pick water instead of sky), and then choose the most representative part of the sky.  If the sky is all exactly the same color, but any smog or haze (like in this one) and you have to play around with it.  If you look closely along the left bottom of the sky you’ll see I wasn’t able to get rid of all of it.  The chroma key effect removed all the blue sky (made them transparent) and left behind the haze.  Or smog.  Whatever.

Next the fancy part.

- I used Power Point to create my credits exactly how I wanted them to appear – using a color that would work with the rest of the images.  I actually printed it lighter “mustard” but the other chroma key effect later on changed it.

- Next, I printed it.  Try to use most of the paper, leaving an inch or two all around.

- Then I got a large non-glossy poster board about the same color as the paper I printed on (I never new there were so many different “colors” of white!).

- I cut inch-wide strips of a 3X5 index card, and folded them and glued them so that they would function as spacers between the poster board and the printed credits.  What I was looking for was a way to hold the credits about half an inch out from a piece of poster board the same color as the paper – and without the sheet with the credits bending.  You may have to get creative here.

- Next I went outside and used duct tape (which really is good for just about anything) to tape the poster board to a wall outside so it was vertical; and set up the camera with tripod, so that it was about 4 feet from the paper, zoomed in so that the credits filled nearly the entire screen.

- Now for the safety briefing:  Make sure there is nothing nearby that will burn easily.  If you have a fire extinguisher or a bucket of water, now might be a good time to have it nearby.

- Now you need a pretty decent lighter – or you can light a larger piece of paper – but you want a good-size flame.  Hit “record” on your camera and light the bottom of the sheet with your credits on fire – as evenly as possible.  You want the whole thing to burn relatively evenly.  If the right side just burns and it falls off the poster board, it won’t work.  Light it all across the bottom.

So after the credits are burned, it’s a matter of importing from your camera to your editing program.  Trim appropriately, and at this point I reversed the clip – so that the credits actually appear from the fire rather than get consumed by it.  This clip goes right over the top of the others, and then you apply another chroma key effect – this time selecting white (your paper) as the color you want to make transparent.

And that’s pretty much it.  You can go out and spend hundreds of dollars (or more) on another program that will do this effect without the risk of having to notify the fire department – but it’s also possible to do it with a very basic editing program.  Good luck!

These days anyone – even I – can put up a website (there oughta be a law…!), which occasionally leads to some strange finds.  If you want to experience your YouTube (or other video sharing site) videos in a new way, check out YooouuuTuuube. There, you can input a link to an online video, set a few parameters, and instantly, the frames of your video will start replicating across your screen in kaleidoscopic fashion.  I have no idea what the point is, but ya gotta admit, it’s different and creative.  I tried out a couple of my own vids, and this one in particular was kind of fun: (click link).  Happy YooouuuTuuubing!