Still Image Sequence

Happy Holidays! I'm currently working on a 3 minute still image sequence. Just one photo after another. I'm working the panning/scanning/fade-in/out like there is no tomorrow. Does anyone have any tips for some wizadry I could perform to make it more visually interesting? Any plug-ins, "special effects" or nifty tricks you could give?
Thanks!

The right movement is important. Also look at the composition of the images and figure out an arrangement. Multi-images (split-screen) can make photo collages more interesting. Some of the other techniques I've used:

- A "spotlight" technique where a feathered Mask Shape is used to make only a "spotlight" area bright and the rest dark as pictures pass through the spotlight one by one;
- "Sliding doors" -- images that are narrow and long are cropped so that they weave into the screen in strips;
- Zooming into an image and doing camera moves to hide/reveal parts of the picture;
- "Mosaic-ing" the pictures so they come into the screen at different timings in geometrically pleasing patterns;
- Doubling a picture so that a black-and-white/blurred version of itself appears behind a smaller version of the normal picture;
- Cropping a part of the picture and flying it in so that, for example, the eyes of the person come in before the rest of his/her face fades in;
- Applying extreme effects to the picture to render it unrecognizable (eg. Ken Stone's Channel filters effects, or some very high Contrast settings coupled with Solarize, Color Corrector etc.), then flying it in before the "distressed" version morphs into the normal version;
- "Mirroring" the picture (a flopped version of itself on the other side of the screen);
- A "Smoke on the Water" effect -- horizontal mirroring of the picture with a Ripple effect applied to the bottom half so it looks like the picture is reflected in a very dark, rippling pond.

The possibilities are endless. Just look at each picture and see what inspiration you get. When not on the job, it pays to play around with effects you never think you're gonna use; this expands your vocabulary so that when the real materials come, you have a wide array of tricks to fall back on. I just did a commercial where, for a temp effect, I used the "Fisheye" filter. I've never used it before except to make mutated versions of actors' stills from films I've edited.

Thanks!

Good suggestions from Derek.
Don't forget the whole gaggle of transitions you have there as well.



Kevin Monahan
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Just don't use Page Peels! Also, the sign of an amateur is a series of pictures one after the other, with every transition being different. That's when you know somebody just cut the pictures one after the other, then went through every entry in the Video Transitions menu and applied every single one, with no thought as to how each specific picture inspires a certain transition. It's the discriminating choices that makes the piece special -- for example, I always take the time to decide whether to use Cross Dissolve, Non-Additive Dissolve or the Nattress Lab Dissolve. One looks better than the others in different cases.