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As I shared in an earlier entry, last month at the Users Group Conference, XMPie demonstrated how it's possible to create personalised videos with uImage using the animation feature in Photoshop CS3 Extended. I've spent the past few weeks thinking about applications for video personalisation and looking for a new project.
I was so impressed by the use of image personalisation in the Bar da Boa beer campaign that I wanted to see how easy it would be to create a similar effect in Photoshop. I found a suitable image of a dancer on iStockphoto and thought I'd give it a try.
I decided to incorporate a logo as a tattoo and see how far I could get. I chose to position the tattoo around the dancers' naval, to make it easier to keep the same position across individual frames—however if I was to redo the project, I'd probably pick a different body area, to give me more flexibility in the choice of logos.
You can view my completed project below. This Flash rendition really doesn't do my work justice, as the exported video from Photoshop uses 25 frames per second and looks very effective, but you get the idea. You can view a better streaming rendition of this video (but with no music) on revver.com.
Note that I've applied a lighting effect on the tattoo as the dancer turns—I achieved this by using a Gradient Overlay layer effect in Photoshop. I also adjusted the tattoo in each individual frame (or layer) to 'move' with the body, by adjusting the horizontal scale and angle of each 'tattoo'.
Similar to the approach on my last project, the tattoo is a single Illustrator Smart Object, duplicated across different layers (using one layer for each frame). As a result, if you change or edit the Smart Object, the changes are updated across all affected layers. I also used a separate Smart Object for the end caption, which means it's very easy to use XMPie uImage to switch out the Smart Object, or personalise any text area, through a business rule. To prove this, I found another logo for the UK mobile company, O2, and without making any changes to my Photoshop document, I simply updated the two Smart Objects (the logo and closing caption), which created the result below.
In closing, I'm quite surprised in how far I managed to get. I'm certainly no Photoshop whizz-kid and I've never done any notable amount of video editing before, but knowledge of a few Photoshop techniques can get you a long way.
It's great to see that XMPie supports Photoshop's animation feature and I hope they'll consider expanding this support in the future. Maybe they'll give the ability to generate movie files on-demand (instead of batch generation) and add ADORs/Content Objects to InDesign documents so you create individual, personalised PDF files with embedded movies. Now wouldn't that would be nice...
Posted on Saturday, 22 March 2008 at 8:13 AM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/104
Eliot,
I was also at the Users Conference and quite excited about the ability to use video. I only wish the support for video in Photoshop was a little bit better. Such as adding scale, rotation and 3D rotation as items that can be keyframed. Then you wouldn't have to have a new layer for every frame to get the match move right.
I could get the same effect in Final Cut Pro much faster since all of the motions required can be keyframed.
Posted by Shalom Pennington on Tuesday, 25 March 2008 at 1:39 AM