I’ve created several videos for Sewanee over the past year and they wanted something a little different than their typical slideshow of photos they do at year’s end.

That’s when the idea for doing 2.5D animation came to mind. I’ve done it once before in a contest video that I did for Kiva.org (didn’t win or even make finals in that one).

After perusing Sewanee’s Flickr page I came up with several photos I thought would be good for this affect, because not every photo may be ideal for this effect.

Working in After Effects

For example, I was looking for photos with only one or two foreground elements which I could remove in photoshop and then place back in a 3D environment that I make from the original. After a lot of photoshopping, the trees were the most difficult, I used the vanishing point filter in photoshop and then brought that file into after effects to finish the job. Videocopilot has a tutorial on this effect here.

It is fairly tedious work to get the camera movement looking natural and to stay within the bounds of the vanishing point image created from photoshop. I enjoyed working on this project and hope you enjoy watching it below and beneath it compare it to the original photos from which I created this video:

Aerial over Sewanee

Rebels Rest first image

Rebels Rest with snow, faded into from the other one.

The cross, the tree in the foreground and low shot made this a good one to use.

Spencer Hall, I had a choice to make since there was a person in this one, I froze the snow in time, then hand animated the person walking at the end when I 'unfroze time' at the end of this clip and the snow started falling again.

Fulford Hall

So as not to have the same delima from the Spencer Hall photo, I just completely removed these two girls walking.

I liked this as the closing shot because it brought you inside and I could create walls with the vanishing point effect where every other photo was so open being outside it only had two planes and this has 5.