Advice on seamlessly using stills within a project?

[kye]

A couple of years ago my wife and I did a trip to India with a charity and the trip consisted of a mixture of tourist stuff as well as visiting the beneficiaries of the charity in a bunch of rural villages.  Due to a combination of factors I didn't film the people we visited in the villages, but I have a number of stills photos that were taken and am now editing the project and looking for advice on how to integrate these images as seamlessly as possible.

The rest of the project consists of footage of travel legs of cities and rural India, as well as the tourist locations like Taj Mahal etc, so my concern is that the images will be a bit jarring, but visiting the villages was a personal highlight of the trip so if anything I want to emphasise those parts rather than de-emphasise them.

The images I have are smartphone images and range from being single images (like a group photo), to having sequences of photos (how people will take 3 or 4 images of something happening), all the way to a few bursts of 20+ images of things like a guy operating a loom.

I'm immediately reminded of the work of Ken Burns, and will definitely animate some movement in the images, but I don't typically narrate my videos and I have very limited audio from these locations, so the images may be required to stand on their own, which I'm concerned about.  I can probably cheat a little and find some audio from elsewhere and use that as ambience, which I've done before on other projects to cover gaps in my filming (lol).  I also took audio when the women sang so I have those too.

I'm thinking that I should embrace it and deliberately give it a more mixed-media feel, considering that I can make stop-motion from the sequences / bursts, and I could even use stills instead of video in other moments where I did shoot video, or even go so far as pulling frames from video to use as stills, in order to kind of 'balance' the amount of stills vs video and make it a consistent style element.

Has anyone edited a project where there were a lot of still images, stop-motion, or other non-video elements?  I'm keen to hear ideas....

[Grimor]

I use Proshow Producer to make basic animated slide shows and then insert on the video when needed. (examples at 1'35" & 2'30")

Narration voice will help with the story. 

[Anaconda_]

I've had projects like this in the past. My favourite ways of doing it - although very time consuming are:

1.

Print the photos, place them in a suitable location, similar to the theme and then film that scene, add some camera movement and it can look really nice. Even placing them in a frame and putting them on a wall / windowsill can help give them sentimental value for people who weren't on the trip.

2.

Create parallaxes. Cut out the main subject, and separate the photo into a number of layers. Add a camera, put it all in a 3D space and do very small camera moves. From there, you can also add puppet pins and give people very small movements as well - like waving, or something.

The main thing is, don't add too much movement, even doing the Ken Burns thing. Subtlety is key with stills.

[Video Hummus]

17 hours ago, Anaconda_ said:

Create parallaxes. Cut out the main subject, and separate the photo into a number of layers. Add a camera, put it all in a 3D space and do very small camera moves. From there, you can also add puppet pins and give people very small movements as well - like waving, or something.

The main thing is, don't add too much movement, even doing the Ken Burns thing. Subtlety is key with stills.

This can be really time consuming but I think it’s absolutely amazing to do for old photos, especially really old large format photos. Really brings them alive. Even super subtle movements like a parallax and say a small object in the scene moving in a natural way can really make a connection between the audience and the subjects in the photo. 

[herein2020]

I'm too lazy to do what most here are suggesting, sounds like an incredible amount of unpaid work. Also, if they are cell phone images prints won't look very good. I do mix stills with video quite often but it is deliberate and planned beforehand, i.e. to show some BTS footage of a video shoot where I will mix the models posing with the final image. For your scenario I would use my old copy of Corel VideoStudio, let it create a slideshow sequence for each major geographic area, select the Ken Burns effect for the slideshow, cut that with actual video in Davinci Resolve, throw some audio tracks on the timeline, cut the audio, video, and slideshows to sync with the audio tracks, add some lower thirds titles to identify the geographic area being shown, and that would be my travel video.

Another option for your particular scenario that I would consider is to not try to mix it all together. Many people these days won't sit through a slideshow let alone a slideshow mixed in with video so I would consider using something like a USB menu creator to instead have a mixture of videos and images that people could navigate to via the menu. For weddings I provide highlight reels which are the wedding trailer, but for the full wedding I break apart the main portions of the wedding (getting ready, first look, arrival, ceremony, reception, send off, etc) and provide them on a USB drive with a full navigation menu that the client can use to navigate to the different portions instead of them having to sit through 2hrs of video at a time.

If your final audience is not someone you can give a USB drive to, then maybe consider a custom website like Wordpress with all of the different media broken out by navigation links.  I'd rather completely rethink my project than spend hours completing one that no one will watch when its done.

If it absolutely must all be in a single video, then as others have said...narration would greatly help.

[filmmakereu]

Interesting thread. This is a good contribution. Pleasant reading.