In April 2016 I worked with Shoreditch based company Elbow Productions on a video for Bletchley Park. Bletchley Park was used during World War II as a central location for Britain's codebreakers, but is now a popular heritage attraction featuring many exhibitions and displays. This video was to be used in a new display about Airships in World War I, and was to be made up of 3 screens next to each other. This meant that we could show 3 separate images at a time, but we could also stretch certain images across 2 or even 3 screens too.
Bletchley Park only had photos and images of WWI posters for us to use in the video, but they wanted these to be brought to life and animated as much as possible within the timeframe we had. I like a challenge like this because you have fairly limited assets but you get to be really creative with them. I used a variety of different techniques to bring these images to life: I edited some photos in Photoshop and then animated them in 2.5D, similarly I edited posters & newspaper articles in Photoshop and put various parts on different layers so I could animate them independently, for other photos I used smoke & bullet overlay effects to bring images of bomb sites and various WWI artillery to life. This allowed me to be creative and bring animation to many of the photos. For most of the video we have separate images across all 3 screens but there are a few occasions where we featured an image across 2 or 3 screens which is quite impactful.
Once I had worked on the animation, I added sound effects to the video to really help bring these animated still images to life. I also found a music track on a stock website which worked really well with the video. Bletchley Park were really pleased with the video & loved what we did with the still images. It is currently featured on site as part of their exhibitions.
As the video is being used in an exhibition I can't share all of it, however below is a short clip:
