Animating Classic Pictures

I’d like to share with you an animated gif I created and give some tips on how to do this type of animation yourself if you want to.

Step 1

Travel to the Musee d'Orsay, in Paris and take a picture of an old artwork that you like. I took this photo with my Nikon P2 of Redon’s picture “The Buddha”

Needless to say the results weren’t the best; there is some glare from the glass that they kept the photo behind. The lighting is very dim for photography and the flash is banned. You can’t use a tripod and crowds of people like to look at the pictures too. The other pictures I took turned out too blurry to use as well. (But I loved the experience! - I wish everyone who wants could do this.)

If I ever get the chance to go back maybe I’ll come armed with a high power camera, a mono-pod and a group of friends to hold everyone else at bay while a took my time taking the photo. Maybe a bat cape would come in useful too to cut out some of the glare. (It’s probably never going to happen unless Steem gets really valuable, lol)

Step 2

Find a suitable image on the web. A photographers copyright on old works of art is pretty questionable so in general I think it is alright to use images of them in your own creative way. If you can find out who took the photo it is best to ask for permission though just to be safe – I’m not a legal expert.

Step 3

Break the image up into multiple layers based on the distance various items appear to be from the viewer in the picture. Each layer will show a section of the objects visible at that depth. You can use the alpha channel or transparency to remove the items that should not be visible on the layer.

There are many different ways of removing part of an image depending on the software you are using. Painting directly on the mask in an alpha channel works well.

Layers may need to have areas filled in if the camera is going to be animated so that the area becomes visible. You can use the clone stamp brush and other techniques to add details to the picture behind items that you place on a layer.

A program like Photoshop or GIMP can be used to do this work and split the graphics up onto layers. You may need to add layers representing the ground or the views to the side or top of the picture depending on how you want to animate the camera.

Step 4

You will need some type of program that supports camera movement through the scene. You can set up each layer you created in the scene in a 3D graphics program and then design a path for the camera to move through.

Here’s a screen capture of the Softimage program I used to do this. You can see the path of the camera and all the layers and objects that have been added for it to move through.

I believe you could do this in Blender too and I may try to do something similar with that program at some point.

For this animation I mapped part of the image onto a sphere and animated the camera moving through it. It felt to me like going into the details of the cosmos and mist as pictured in the abstract looking background area of the original picture.

Step 5

Render out the images in the 3D program and use software to make a gif file or other video format. I used GIMP and added some pauses on a couple frames so that it didn’t look like constant movement. This file is actually a bit big for posting on a blog, I hope it works well for everyone.

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I know I have left out many details but hopefully this is enough to get you started and thinking about other creative projects you might want to try with the software you are most familiar with.

Thanks for reading! I hope you found this interesting.