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This is how Disney’s Multiplane camera worked to create fake perspective

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Perspective is a wonderful thing. It’s what lets us judge distance. How far away something is, to pick out what’s in the foreground from what’s in the background. It’s why we have two eyes. Cameras, though, only have one. In a still photograph, this isn’t much of a problem. Things just need to be roughly the right size relative to everything else and you can just flat stack 2D images.

When you move a camera, though, for animation or video, flat 2D images stacked on top of each other are an instant giveaway. Walt Disney knew this, so he developed the Multiplane Camera. It allowed him to stack the layers in 3D space so that when the camera moved, we see the shift in parallax and perspective. I saw a small clip of a video on Facebook, so I went hunting for the original on how it works.

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Watch Frank Sinatra Brought To Life With A Hypnotizing 2.5D Parallax Movie

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If Frank Sinatra was alive, December 12th would have marked his 100th birthday. For this occasion Universal Music released a movie featuring the legend made by filmmaker Basti Hansen to promote the “Ultimate Sinatra CD Box”. Here is the cool thing, Basti did not want to use the ‘same old’ footage that have been seen-to-death again, and given complete creative freedom from Universal Music he created “a fun experience” from old Sinatra photographs. We asked Basti to share his thoughts about making the movie.
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How To Do A 2.5D Parallax Animated Photo Effect Using Only Free Software

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I had been fiddling with creating these 2.5D parallax animated photos for quite a few years now, but there had recently been a neat post by Joe Fellows that brought it into the light again.

The reason I had originally played with the idea is part of a long, sad story involving my wedding and an out-of-focus camcorder that resulted in my not having any usable video of my wedding (in 2008). I did have all of the photographs, though. So as a present to my wife, I was going to re-create the wedding with these animated photos (I’m 99% sure she doesn’t ever read my blog – so if anyone knows her don’t say anything! I can still make it a surprise!).[Read More…]

DIY – The Panorama Head El Cheapo!

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How to take good panoramas? Sounds simple, right? Take some shots with some overlapping landscape, go to your favorite stitching software, and stitch them up (I like panorama tools AKA PT, and autostich AKA autostich). Right? Not exactly…

If you’ve done a panorama or two, you must have noticed those annoying vertical stitching lines. Some are caused by wide angle distortion, some due to Polarizer filter that stayed on, and some are the “software’s fault”. Allot of those annoying stitching lines are caused due to something called parallax. In layman’s terms Parallax means that your camera’s focal plan does not “sit” (or as Neo would say – is “not in one”) with rotations axis of your camera. confused? Here is a great article to explain this. So if you want to get professional panoramas you need to do something about it; This something is called Using the Nodal Point (is it me, or does this term sounds a bit weird). Curious? here is how you find your Nodal Point. Of course DIYPhotography.net is not the first to find this Nodal thing. you can always get some cheap accessories for panorama at Manfrotto. Or you can try and build one yourself, just like Stefan Lindgren – DIY-er extraordiner.[Read More…]

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