Sailing Skies

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

PHOTO CREDIT/Instagram: @cameraruben

PicDrift Artist Breakdown:

When you have this good of a photo, it's pretty easy to make it even better with parallax animation. It is a great composition with clearly separated main subject in the front, boat in the middle, and horizon with the sky in the back.

What I wanted to accomplish was to capture the motion of a boy jumping in the water. Having that in mind, I purposely cut him out in Photoshop with legs and arms on separate layers, so I could have greater control when animating in After effects. The rest of the elements were fairly easy to layer.

When creating a 3D scene in After effects, I was experimenting with the distance between the front, middle and back layers along the Z-axes, as well as the camera motion, to get the best possible parallax effect.

After I decided on camera motion, the next thing was to animate the boy jumping. Having the torso and all the limbs on separate layers, allowed me to animate their position and rotation individually, which greatly contributed to a more believable jump motion, capturing the viewer's attention.

To make the animation more believable, I created a wave motion in the water, placed the lens flare in the back acting as the sun and created a custom water droplets in the air to emphasize the motion even more.