Meet the Fletchers

First up my son Nathan. Apprently he is too busy to be bothered at the moment. His picture was created using a technique that was developed, as far as I can’t tell, by Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg. It is a form of animated GIF called a cinemagraph. A good friend of mine in Ukraine, who is constantly forwarding cool links from the web my way, turned me on to these Saturday morning and they have consumed my weekend.

Now, before you go thinking you couldn’t do this let me tell you that all the software I used to create this picture, and the ones below, is available “free”. Ok, mostly, I downloaded a 30 trial version of Photoshop CS5 which IS free…but only for 28 more days. I’ll provide links below as well as links to the tutorials I used to help me figure this out.

I won’t recreate a full tutorial here but in general the process of creating these involves taking a short video and importing the video into Photoshop as frames, which is a one click operation. Next you choose a single frame to use as your still image and decide which parts of the picture you’d like to have move.

For this picture of my wife Libby I originally had the tree moving in the background but it was too distracting. I decided to just allow the breeze to tousle her hair, a much nicer effect I think.

In this picture of my daughter Caelyn it is easy to tell that the animation goes out and back, much like in Nate’s picture. The trick here was deciding how much of her head should be allowed to move. We got some pretty freaky results midway through with her head stretching in odd ways!

With Ian I wanted to try something subtle but with a cyclical motion so it wouldn’t have the bounce back and forth effect as seen in a couple of the others. This one is the smallest file size, has the fewest frames, and took the longest to create. Getting the masking just right on this was the hard part. You gotta wonder how long he’ll go before his glasses are clean.

These really reminded me of the moving pictures in the Harry Potter movies. My family has been laughing at me all weekend because I have been coming up with crazier and crazier ideas on what to make these picture do. But imagine if you could create an entire family photo album like this, how fun would that be to show your friends?

Of course you’re now probably thinking, “Ok Fletch, nice widget, have fun.” But I am telling you that with a minimum of Photoshop knowledge, or just the ability to read tutorials on line really, you could create these from some of your own videos in less time than it takes to go out to lunch. SO… here’s what I used:

• Canon 7D (my new camera of which I said, “Don’t think I’ll use the video bit)
• Photoshop CS5 30 day trial
• Cenimagraph Tutorials (The second one worked best for me)
• A nifty plug in to reduce the number of colors (also free, download the file after you have Photoshop installed and allow PS to open it as an action)

I know it sounds like a lot of work but it took me longer to download and install the trial of Photoshop than it did to create the first Cinemagraph of Nate and the results can be really rewarding, well worth the effort.

When you get into it you get tempted to start thinking of story like reveals (like winning at cards) but then you use a LOT of frames and your files get pretty big, TOO big to upload on WordPress!

Hope you enjoyed meeting my people. They’re quite cool themselves, though I may be out of the house by the end of the week if I don’t stop hounding them to take 10 second videos!

This technique is relatively new still. Since it is pretty portable to the web and mobile devices what type of application comes to mind when brainstorming how to use these in your business or ministry?