Animate Still Photos in After Effects

Arturo has briefly gone over this technique in class, but I recently saw a very impressive video made entirely of still images from the WWF archive that have been animated to look like video. It's a really captivating technique and it gives the pictures a breath of new life. Ken Burns, I'm sorry, but your methods are just too old school nowadays. It's time to get our pictures animated with After Effects!

First, check out the video they cerated:

Some of these shots took a lot more worth then others, but you can see how much more captivating the picture becomes when it starts moving. If one of you is looking to create a similar effect in your movie trailer project, here's a nifty tutorial by The Creators Project that walks you through the process:

Stimulate Your Senses

So I have been bouncing around through all kinds of cool animated videos on YouTube and various sites for a solid half hour this evening. I came across some super awesome fluid simulation clips for awhile. Much of what I saw seemed to be created with a program called Blender, but there were some others as well. I haven't given much thought to animating liquids before, but the outcomes are mesmerizing. The videos demonstrate all types of things like morphing what appears to be water into shapes like teapots and humans to making liquids "dance" to the beats of music. Some of what I saw reminded me of the clip we watched in class during the first week designed through Processing (where it looked like grains of sand flowing into and out of body shapes). Then all of a sudden I thought of the 5 Gum commercials because many of them have elements that remind me of this type of animation. Specifically the commercials for the React and Rain gums channel the fluid simulation videos I started off watching. The React commercial (which I've included) morphs a black blob into different shapes and the Rain commercial has a giant pool of metallic marbles that pulsate. 5 Gum does a great job marketing in my opinion because those advertisements stick in your mind and make you curious to try their product. But that is beside the point. So I'm left wondering now if After Effects can do any animation that resembles this? Or would Processing be better? I'm not sure, but it'll be something fun to look into!