Photo Multi-Plane in After Effects

In this tutorial, we show you how to break your image into 3D planes, and do a 3D camera move to simulate motion.  You’ve seen it in documentaries. You’ve seen it in TV shows.  Now you can do it yourself.  It’s the Ken Burns effect on steroids

 

Credits: Thanks to John Gumaer for doing the intro sound design.

Comments

4 responses to “Photo Multi-Plane in After Effects”

  1. liam Avatar
    liam

    great demo. how’d you move the clouds in the sample shot?

    1. Josh Avatar
      Josh

      Thanks Liam. I will post a follow up where I go through that image as well. However, in the mean time, the trick was separating the sky into a 3rd plane. I just masked the background and made a separate layer for the clouds. I tilted it so that the top of the clouds were a little closer to the camera than the bottom of the clouds. Then I did a feathered mask to blend them in with the rest of the background. A good tip with clouds, and what I did there, was to use CC Slant to reposition them instead of actually using position keyframes. It gives a bit more realistic result sometimes.

  2. stib Avatar
    stib

    at about 6:15 you should give the “Scale Comp” script a try – it’s in file>scripts>

    1. Josh Avatar
      Josh

      Yep, that was going to be one of my tips in the part 2, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. A bunch of new tutorials coming soon though!