Playing With New Technology: Animating Still Photographs

This is what I like about photographs. They're proof that once,
even if just for a heartbeat, everything was perfect.
Jodie Picoult ​

by Skip Cohen

For years, I've referred to myself as the low-tech poster child for the industry. In fact, I played off that theme in a post many years ago, demonstrating how easy it was to use X-Rite's ColorMunki to calibrate your monitor.

Here's the short backstory...

A year ago, we lost Sheila's brother Randy after a long fight following a brain aneurysm. Randy was on my mind yesterday because it was Veterans' Day, and I've never known a prouder Marine. We used to accuse him of sleeping in any one of a dozen military baseball hats, his signature attire.

While going through old files in my Shutterfly account, I ran across this still shot of Randy and Sheila from when he visited us ten years ago. I don't remember even seeing it initially. 

Yesterday, scrolling through Facebook, an ad came up for an animation company using AI to animate still photographs. You've all seen them, and I decided it was worth a few minutes to play with the software. The company was alivemoment.com. I didn't do a whole lot of research; I just decided to give it a try at their minimal-cost one-month trial level.

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By adding a short piece of royalty-free music from Wondershare Filmora 12, the short clip above was complete.

If you've known or followed me for even the shortest amount of time, you should have figured out that I'm one of the industry's biggest cheerleaders. But while I respect new technology, I'm not an early adopter, and probably one of the last people to change to something new. The concept of animating old photographs is hardly new, but the results of this first personal test drive blew me away.

What I do love and have written about hundreds of times over the years is how photographs capture memories and allow us to relive them, long after the events themselves are long over. But this particular image was so wonderful and over-the-top that I hesitated even to show it to Sheila.

As we both teared up watching it several times, Sheila said, "Oh my God, you brought Randy back to life!"  

Before posting this morning, I wanted to grab one of my favorite group shots from close to 25 years ago at WPPI. It's not quite as effective, but it definitely captured what we were all feeling that night, catching up to Big Daddy...lots of laughs. And with Don Blair and Terry Deglau both having passed away, it's a poignant moment to watch an animated still photograph.

Is it something I'd want to do on every photograph, of course not. But just like all of us being filter-junkies in the early days of Photoshop, it's a kick to play and experiment with.

​And like Jodi Picoult's quote above that I've shared so many times...it was a time when everything was perfect!