"Movie Magic" with Stills and Dissolve
"Movie Magic" with Stills and Dissolve
iMovie offers few tools to add a bit of ‚drama‘ to stills/photos, such as the widely known Ken Burns effect.
But you can do even more, by ‚prepping‘ the stills before usage in iMovie. The basic concept of this trick is, to create two versions of the same pic and add a dissolve in iMovie between these two pics.
For this preproduction-preparation you need a picture-processor; no need for giant Photoshop 😉, I like to recommend Pixelmator, but you can (ab)use Keynote or even the Preview.app to create some of the following suggestions.
Watch the demo here:
Examples:
Fading colors
pic#1 is in color, same pic is prepped in b/w - the dissolve fades-out the color-saturation of the picture.
You can elaborate this effect, by prepping the pic#2 even more, adding gradients, or vice versa over-saturate/Instagram looks, or use a ‚comic like' filtered version as pic#2 to fade from real to illustration, …
Highlighting
pic#1 is the original, pic#2 has blurred the unwanted parts - the dissolve highlights one person
You’re not limited by just blur - desaturate unwanted parts, add circles, frames, 'text' = titles ...
Multiple titles/arrows
pic#2 has titles and graphical elements - dissolve let that ‚title‘ appear.
You’re not limited by just #1 to #2… create 3,4,5 versions of the picture to let title#1 appear first, fade it out, let title#2 appear, fade it out, etc etc.
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Multiple pictures in one frame
You like more than one picture in one frame? Prepare your composition in your pic-processor; adding a dissolve btw. each version let each picture appear until the final compo is on screen.
Adding the 'titles' in a pic-processor allows multiple 'titles' in one pic, diff. styles than the given ones in iMovie, crazy colors, text-styles etc
Or, put two stills side-by-side; create split-screens; use the concept of stop-motion to 'animate' your pics...
Happy Movie-Making! 😁
k.