There have been some famous documentaries on TV which have been largely based on historical still photographs. The best known is probably the American Civil War series.
We have also seen amateur “movies” based on family photos. The most recent one that comes to mind suffered greatly from a lack of movement, a lack of close-ups, a lack of explanation of what we were watching, and too much repetition of the same photos. However, if my memory serves me right there was a stills-only movie called “Scandinavian Oddities” which won a Ten Best prize for Dr John Davies 40 years ago. John explained to the club that he deliberately copied his projected slides with a hand held camera to make it look like normal movie camera shake.
It would be unusual for a good movie to be made solely from still images. The aforementioned Civil War series was fleshed out with live interviews and visits to relevant locations. So stills can be part of an interesting movie. Here are some of the possible occasions where they could be useful in our kind of movies;
We need a clip to go over a commentary or behind a title and we have no appropriate video.
We need an image from an historic situation, when there were no movies.
We need an image of a person now dead or otherwise inaccessible or too changed.
We want to create the atmosphere of another era.
We want to make the image of an object move across the screen.
When we do decide to use a still picture it is good to know
that we can do all sorts of movements and zooms with or on or in the
image. In film days this was done on an
animation rostrum. Nowadays our
computers can mimic all the movements that the rostrum camera could do.
In this opening couple of minutes from our movie “Purnululu” watch for movement of still images.
It was used in these three ways;
The opening pan across the mountain range is a pan across a series of digital still photos.
The map behind the title is a digital photo which the program zooms into.
The route of the helicopter flight is marked by a moving digital photo which is shrunk, distorted and rotated as it moves along its path.
Rostrum work can be done within at least two of our common video editing programs; Pinnacle Studio 9 Plus (fairly basically) and Adobe Premiere (moderately well in Version 6; much better in Premiere Pro). No doubt other programs can do it too. The facility is usually found under “Motion” or “Motion Path” in the “Effects” folder.
However the most powerful program I have tried (and the easiest to use) is a specialist rostrum program called “DigiRostrum”. This is available for free downloading and 30 day trial from www.lumidium.com. The trial version is great fun to use and produces clean video files which you can incorporate in your own movie.
To demonstrate DigiRostrum I am loading the trial version. To explain the screen parts I will load a still picture;
Load 20030513-MemcAtMotel04.jpg.
Note that the dotted frame indicates what the “camera” is seeing. This frame can be moved from position to position, sized, rotated, paused, speeded up or slowed down. Let’s do all these things on this one photo. Then we turn it into a movie file.
The next picture will be used to demonstrate a simple zoom
in;
Load 20030513-MemcAtWinery08.jpg
There are limits to what you can do by zooming in to the detail in a picture. Simple arithmetic will tell you what is practical. The video frame is 720 pixels wide by 576 high. If you zoom into a frame taken from a video clip you will soon go out of focus, just like using the digital zoom on your camera. But if you start with a large digital still you may be able to do quite a lot of panning and zooming.
Most of my casual shots are 1600 by 1200 pixels, and the occasional more serious ones are 2272 by 1704. When you realise that digital sequences can be stitched together on the computer you can get much larger files in the resulting pans – some of our examples are 6671 X 1118 and 7939 X 527.
Editing programs may set limits on the size they allow you to import. Some limit or convert stills to 720 X 576 which is pretty useless. Premiere 6 has a stated limit of 4000 X 4000 but did accept a 6671 X 1118 still.
Panning within a still picture is subject to the same rules as panning with the video camera. Pan slowly. Pan smoothly. Accelerate and decelerate at start and end smoothly. Start and finish with a short pause. DigiRostrum can do all these things for you.
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