Animated Flight

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Dan Anderson

Instagram: @dan.anderson.photos

PicDrift Artist Breakdown:

The main thing I was trying to do with this animation was to capture the feeling of real airplanes flying. The Photoshop part of the job was no trouble at all since both airplanes were very easy to cut out and the background was easy to fill in.

The main part of the job was animating the layers in After effects. I moved the airplanes separately in Z-axes and animated their positions so they could fly past the camera at different speeds. Also, I animated the camera in that way so it seems like they are passing by really close to each other and the camera.

The special thing I did was to animate the rotation of the propellers which gave the viewer a feeling of watching real airplanes flying.

The lens flare and tiny air particles spread in 3D space contributed to that even more.