Planes Are Made To Fly

Watch this still photo brought to life. Read the PicDrift breakdown below to see how it was made.

PHOTO CREDIT: D-R Hayes

https://www.drhayesphoto.com

Instagram: @d_r_hayes_photo

PicDrift artist breakdown:

This was a really fun project to work on. Four airplanes in a formation with smoke coming out was a great possibility to capture motion and emphasize the parallax effect.

I cut out every airplane separately and the rest of the image into four different layers and placed them in different positions on the Z axes to create depth when animating the camera movement. I have also created four separate smoke trails which I animated with distortion effect to make them behave more like real smoke.

To fill out the missing parts of the image I use content-aware fill and different cloning tools in Photoshop. The final touch was the animation of the propellers. This wouldn't be possible if the propellers weren't on a 90 degrees angle towards the camera. It took a bit of experimenting with the rotation speed to make it seem like it was captured in slow motion.

The camera zoom in and to the side really captured the movement of the airplanes and made the animation complete.