I figured out how to do it as I was viewing them and I promised myself that i would give it a go one day. It seems today was that day. As I set my work station off on a 2 hour render I mused what to do that would be productive. I had been set a challenge from another great photographer to shoot a pic that represents movement and stillness and the cinemagraph popped into my head and I thought it was about time to put my idea to the test. I only had 2 hours to plan, shoot and to make the final shot.
After looking around the office for some ideas I thought a coffee was needed to move it forward and out in the grounds is a large Bamboo plant that was gently swaying in the breeze. Perfect I thought but just a bush moving isn't really much to look at so I made it even harder for myself and made it a self portrait too.
So I set up the camera 5D mkII, popped a LED Light panel off to the side and set it to quite a fast shutter speed as I wanted each frame to be sharp without any motion blur. Even thought the breeze wasn't strong I wanted to try and reduce the frame rate down in post so the gif wasn't too heavy on data.
I tried doing some jumps while filming as I thought that me hovering in the air with the leaves moving would have been good but as it happens I just looked silly as you couldn't see my feet very clearly amongst the bush.
So just standing and letting the breeze move the leaves was nice apart from the fact it was around 2ºC. I took the footage into After effects and cropped a 5 second moment I was happy with and made the comp 10 seconds long. I then duplicated the layer and masked me out with a slight feathering and made it a freeze frame. Then I reduced the speed of the bottom layer to around 50% so it gave it a little surreal feel to it. I used time remapping to play it for 5 seconds forward and 5 seconds backwards to make it seem like it was looping. Its not perfect and I could make it much tighter but I was running out of time.
After rendering it out I took it in to Photoshop and played with some split toning and adjustment layers and added the text. Then I saved it for 'web and devices' and told it to be a GIF file and to loop forever. Like I say it is a first go to see if my method would work and it worked very well indeed. So next time I get a longer time frame I may have ago at making something nice to look at.
Here is the finished GIF.
If you would like a full tutorial or just some more information then please find us on facebook and ask away. Thanks for your time and please send me any that you have made.
Cheers
Aaron
