How to:

Make a Movie with Digital Stills

Words: Jason Wishnow

The next time you need a change of pace from the routine of 720 x 480 interlaced DV, you might consider an alternative that isn't Flash: making digital movies from digital still images.

A movie made from stills may conjure flashbacks to third grade health-ed filmstrips or Chris Marker's slideshow-chic La Jetée. But a cursory glance around the Web reveals that the time-honored tradition of punk collage has been appropriated by Flash animators, with JPEGs culled from cyberspace, twisted and bent to some random soundtrack, with no input device necessary.

If you decide to venture down this path, you'll need a way to get your pictures into your computer. There are three readily accessible alternatives to the camcorder: the scanner, the Web cam and the digital still camera.

Re-Animation | THE SCANNER

Rumor has it Rodney Ascher made his short movie Buddha Bar for less than $30. How'd he do it?

The San Francisco-based filmmaker and provocateur bought a couple of disposable cameras at the drug store, then shot and developed photos of the local watering hole to create his atmospheric festival film. Rodney scanned his photographs, chopped them into layers with Photoshop and recreated a sense of movement in After Effects.

"The world around us is in constant motion," Rodney explains. "The photo freezes it in place [de-animation] and then the process brings it back to life [re-animation]. Though, when things are re-animated they're never quite the same."

Rodney returned to Chinatown with Liz Phair to create the video for her song "Down." He describes the post processing as meticulous, tedious and lengthy, whereas "the actual shoot is the simplest, least restrictive thing in the world." He continues, "There were only a few of us on the set and we just wandered through the crowd and the parade at will. Often it was just me and Liz without the whole army you typically associate with music video production. I sketched out a loose plan but it was a largely spontaneous operation."

Rodney's spontaneous operation consumed 100 rolls of 35mm film shot on a Canon EOS using a few different lenses. When asked if he would go digital for his next re-animation, Rodney said that he is considering it, although he would prefer using medium or large format film to increase his ability to zoom around within a single frame.

As for the mystery of Re-Animation, a process Liz Phair describes on her site as something only Rodney knows how to do, the director explains, "Don't get the idea that I do any fancy z-axis 3-D virtual camera math or programming! I just combine elements from a couple of pictures, separate things into layers in Photoshop, replace backgrounds and then wiggle 'em around in After Effects. All the parallax scrolling and zooming are figured out as I go shot by shot. I think of myself as primarily a live action guy so I just adjust the scale, position, and blur keyframes until they look right to my eye." You can see Asher's work at thedirectorsbureau.com and the "Down" video at www.hollywoodandvine.com/lizphair.

 Watch Rodney Ascher's still image movie "Alfred" on sputnik7