GIFs are everywhere recently, particularly this style of stop motion video, so I had a little go. When I bought this blockbuster set, its lovely packaging design and structure just screamed for a content opportunity.
Working from my bedroom with only the natural lighting, no tripod, and a 50mm lens, I struggled to get the effect I really wanted. But, hey, I made the most of what was at my disposal!
I made the gifs from a series of still images, edited within Lightroom with one of my presets, that I put together in the Timeline tool within Photoshop CC.
It's a pretty quick and simple process, then I exported them as mp4 videos using Adobe Media Encoder, so they're not technically GIFs. Lingo conflicts.
Looking back, should this series have been for a client, I would have re-done the above one. In this one in particular, you can see the lighting/ white balance changes ever so slightly between the frames (from shooting in natural light), and I refrained from spending too much time correcting this in Lightroom.
Instead, I would've individually masked out each item, keeping the background the exact same in each frame, as an easy way out of this. This should then have given a better effect, so the viewer focuses purely on the products rather than the cactus etc.
I actually shot the last two sat on my Scandinavian-style desk chair, facing the window, and hung the blanket over the top and faced the plant towards the frame to give it a little more edge. As you can see, the above one is made up of just two frames alternating, to give the 3D effect that is used in a lot of live music photography and so on.
It was fun to have a play around, but now I'm just dying for a home studio to be able to work on this kinda of thing with far more ease! Today, I handed in my application for my university's Enterprise scholarship so fingers crossed I can make that dream a reality soon…
Follow my Instagram to see more of this in the future!
