Hello everyone. This is Archist.
And today, I'm gonna show you how to create a parallax zoom in animation like the one you see here.
But first, let me show you how is Disney created it back in the day.
When our camera moves in closer on this moonlight scene, you'll notice that
everything grows larger including the moon.
Now, when you walk along a country road toward the moon,
it certainly doesn't grow larger like this,
nor does it shrink in size when you walk away from it.
The problem was
how to take a painting, and make it behave like a real piece of scenery under the camera.
The trouble was we were photographing a
flat two-dimensional background.
So, we set about making plans and blueprints
for a new cartoon camera that would overcome this.
The different elements in the scene were separated according to their varying distances from the viewer.
This put the moon on a plane farthest
away from the camera.
With our original picture broken down in this manner, it is possible to control the relative speed
with which each individual part of it
moves to or away from the camera,
but the moon remains absolutely still. And so it will always remain the same neither
growing or shrinking in size.
Of course, a cartoon camera does not shoot sideways,
but is placed above and shoots downward toward the drawing.
Since, this new camera used many planes,
we called it the multi-plane camera.
Wait, wait, wait, wait!!!.
We don't have unlimited resources like Disney,
but let's try to work with something we have.
So, the tools required
for this are an iPad, an Apple pencil,
a Lumafusion app and a procreate app.
Our first step is to draw the scene that we are trying to animate.
We could have drawn the scene in Photoshop or by using other softwares too,
but this one was done in procreate, and this is the
time-lapse video of its making.
This is actually a scene that I created for one
of my first animations called 'the
Lantern Night'.
If you'd like to see the full version of 'the Lantern Night', the link is in the description below.
One important thing to keep in mind when
drawing the scene is that we have to
separate the layers. For example, on this
scene, I made every row of benches on
different layers. So, the trick here is to
zoom into these different layers in
different scales. So, the layers that are
closer to the camera will be zoomed into
more than the layers further away from
the camera, giving the viewer the
illusion of a three-dimensional space.
So, in this scene, there are 11 layers we'll be working with.
Our next step is to import all these layers to Lumafusion separately.
First, let's open Lumafusion, create a new project.
For now, I'm just gonna name it, Parallax zoom.
Now, let's locate those PNG files we created earlier and drag and drop it to our timeline.
Make sure we import the bottom layer first.
In our case, it's layer 11.
Let's make this layer 10 seconds long.
Now, let's go ahead and import all the
other layers too.
In our case, the order will be 11, then 10, then 9 and so on.
For now, Lumafusion only allows us to stack 6 photos or videos on top of each other.
Let's just work with these layers for now.
I have 11 layers in total here,
but you might not have as many layers in
your project.
Now, let's make all the layers 10 seconds long.
The way I do it is by extending all the
layers of beyond 10 seconds, and place
the time cursor at the 10 seconds mark
and then deselect all the layers.
You can do this by touching somewhere outside of the layers
and hitting the trim button at the bottom.
Now, lets delete those extra clips.
After all that, we go into the last layer by double tapping on it and
create two frames. One at the beginning and
one at the end. To do that, we're going to
tap the jump back button and tap the
plus button at the bottom left and then
tap the jump forward button and tap the
same plus button. We're going to leave
the beginning frame as is and only mess
with the end frame.
We'll now increase the size of the end frame to 105.
We'll do the same on other layers, but instead we're
zooming their end frames in the
increments of 5.
So, the layer 10 will be zoomed at
size 110, layer 9 will be zoomed at 115,
layer 8 at 120 and so on. Zooming
different layers at different scale will
create an illusion of zooming into a
3-dimensional space.
Now, let's review for what we have so far.
Since we're happy with what we have at the moment, let's go ahead and export the clip in the highest possible quality.
Now, let's import the same video into
Lumafusion.
We're going to repeat the process one more time.
Now, we add the remaining layers.
Make sure the PNG layers are imported in the correct order, making it all ten seconds long.
Now, when we go into the fifth layer, we'll
increase the size five more than the sixth layer,
which is 135.
Now,  we do the same with all remaining layers.
The fourth will be 140, third 145, second 150, and the first layer will be 155.
Now, let's quickly review the parallax
zoom till now.
Our third step is to add the out of focus effect.
Let's start with layer one, the one closest to the camera.
Let's put our time cursor at the end
frame. Make sure the colors and effects
is turned on and tap the blurs tab, which
looks like a teardrop. It is located at
the top right corner. When we select the
Gaussian ten, we automatically create a
frame at the end of this clip. And let's
create another frame, somewhere in the middle.
In this case at the 5 second mark.
After that, we bring down the blur radius to zero.
By doing this, the blur effect
only starts at the 5 second mark.
We go back and do something similar in layer two.
But, this time we are going to make a maximum gaussian radius 8 at the end of
the clip.
And, we'll start the effect at 6 second mark.
Now, we repeat the process with other
layers, decreasing the maximum gaussian blur
by two and delaying the blur
effect by one second respectively.
And let's review the effect as we move
forward .
After doing all that, let's export it again to the highest possible quality.
Here, I'm exporting this clip to my photos.
After that export we're going to crop the video.
So, we are  going to our photos where we exported our animation, and open it up.
Since, we only need the second half of the animation,
we're going to crop the first half out.
When we are happy with the crop, we just
save the video.
So, there we go!
This is what our final animation looks like.
If you still have some more questions, let me know in the comments below.
Thank you very much for watching.
And, like and subscribe if it helped you in any way.
Thank you.
