My Dad (Martin Parry) has just completed a film project he has been incubating for many years called Railway Town. If you like stream trains and films this is the thing for you. Its a fantastic piece of work which the BBC called ‘A Triumph’.
It was great to cut my teeth at something new and help out in the process with these short animations I produced. The aim was to bring life back to a number of archive photographs and really emphasis the visual storytelling from a period where very little moving film exists.
The first is a simple motion parallax zoom of Aneurin Bevan, father of the NHS. I extracted the microphone and Bevan himself from the photograph using Photoshop. By keeping the foreground objects in the same location and scaling them up I was able to avoid the need to remove them from the background image.
The next is another motion parallax zoom, this time of a sketched view of New Swindon from Old Swindon. Photoshop was used again to extract the foreground objects but this time I needed to create background areas where they have been previously using a copy and paste approach.
This animation uses a number of particle simulators to generate a smoke effect from the chimney stacks of the railway works. I’ve also added a little animation to a number of the carriages to simulate activity.
One more parallax zoom, this time over the famous Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol. I ran out of time but I wanted to also add motion to the boats down below in the gorge.
And finally one more motion parallax zoom showing a street scene. This was actually the first one I did so a little rougher in its motion and could do with a bit more work I think.