Jump Serve

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

PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Wolf

Instagram: @andywolfimages

PicDrift Artist Breakdown:

This was a great photo and another fun project to work on. Since there wasn't a lot of foreground, middle ground and background elements to create a noticeable parallax, my main goal was to recreate the motion of the girl doing the serve.

To do that, I had to cut out the girl's arm and a leg on separate layers in Photoshop, so I could animate them later in After Effects. The only challenging part was selecting the sand in the air behind the girl. Since there wasn't much separation from the rest of the sand, I had to manually select as much floating sand as I could, using different selection methods.

After I imported all the layers in After Effects and after creating a 3D scene with the camera, it was time to animate the girl jumping. I spent time watching a lot of different Volleyball videos on Youtube to replicate the motion of the real Volleyball serve.

Animating the rotation of the arm and the leg as well as the ball's position and rotation, greatly contributed to the overall feel of an actual jump serve. Animating the camera moving down, made the jump even more noticeable.

All that was left to do, was to spice it up a bit putting the lens flare and some sand particles moving through the air, using a 3D particle generator plug-in. I've also animated the scale and the position of the sand behind her feet, trying to make it behave more realistically.