From the course: Motion Control 3D: Bringing Photos to Life in Three Dimensions with After Effects and Photoshop CC (2019)

Creating 3D motion with photos

From the course: Motion Control 3D: Bringing Photos to Life in Three Dimensions with After Effects and Photoshop CC (2019)

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Creating 3D motion with photos

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Hi, my name's Rich Harrington, and in this course, we're going to explore techniques that help you bring photos to life. We'll draw upon the powers of both Photoshop and After Effects using a technique that is actually built upon some of the traditional ones used in the documentary film industry for years. I refer to this as Motion Control 3D. Regular motion control was when you used a physical camera and a robotic control arm or an operator to do pans and zooms on photographs. But now, thanks to improvements in digital tools, we can migrate these techniques and do all sorts of great new things. By taking a photograph into Photoshop and splitting it into layers, and then filling in some of the missing pieces, we can actually create a virtual environment where different parts of the photo occupy different Z-space axis. Then, by animating a camera in After Effects, we can draw upon parallax effects, wrap focus, zooms, pans and more, to create movement. This is a really exciting technique, and one that I've used for years at my production company. It's been popular for feature films, documentaries, and television commercials, and you can use it in corporate videos, or even web content to great success. There are a lot of things that you're going to learn in this course, and I strongly encourage you to watch the course in a linear fashion, from beginning to end. These are in-depth techniques, so you're going to want to make sure that you dig in, and take a few days to get through the whole material. All right, let's get started.

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