My usual medium for storytelling is print, a beautiful yet frozen form of weaving characters, scenes and events together. Publishing on the web certainly provides a much more dynamic way to share a story – but graphics and GIFs and video are still secondary to the text in the majority of cases.
But making a film – being completely immersed in and driven by visuals – is an amazing experience! The same guidelines for good storytelling still apply. But crating a great story from the raw materials available means drawing on a whole different set of tools. And one of my favorite visual tools in the process so far has been bringing still photos to life through animation!
My inspiration for animating photos is the documentary Valley Uprising. (If you haven’t seen it, do!) Here are a few of the animations I’ve been working on. I don’t know if they’ll all make the cut into the final version of the film. But they’ve been fun to create – and the process of creating them will certainly have contributed to the animations you do ultimately see in the film!
The Bees of Grand Staircase-Escalante 