Butterfly Beauty

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Carla Jacobson

Instagram: @carlajacobson

PicDrift Artist Breakdown:

It was not the perfect original Photoshop composite, but that made me challenge myself to make it better. And the one thing that stood out was the butterflies.

After I cut out everything in Photoshop, I imported the composition in After effects and that's where the magic happened. I turned the layers into 3D and spread them out in Z-axes to create depth. Then it was time to fill out space with butterflies. I use a very powerful 3rd party 3D particle system called Trapcode Particular from Red Giant which allows me to create custom particles from any image.

So, I imported the butterflies into the particle system and after a couple of tweaks, the magic was done. After that, I put a lens flare acting like the sun, and animated the camera in that way to reveal the sun behind the girl.

The final touch was animating her hair twirling in the wind. For that, I had to cut out her hair on a separate layer in Photoshop and animate it with a Turbulent displace effect in After effects.

After all said and done, I was really happy with how this animation turned out!