I enjoy working with my clients to create these amazing projects. Each one provides new challenges and opportunities for a beautiful outcome.

In developing your design, first consider the occasion. This can range from any event birth to death, including birthdays, graduations, weddings, anniversaries, celebrating friendship, or just because.

Next, consider our product line and how you might want to showcase your design. We make business cards, keychains, lapel pins, pendants, rearview mirror danglers, 4" window charms, 5" magnets, car magnets, prints from wallet to 8"x10", and posters from 11"x17" to 19"x27".

Next you will be considering the effect you wish to produce. Using only one photo, we could create a 'ray trace' effect where certain parts (like hair and water) come alive in a ripple type movement. It is a morphing technique which moves parts of the image slightly in one direction or another.

Using two photos is great for 'before and after' type image sequences. Also, you could choose to morph one image into another. Morphing the same person at different periods of their life causes the image to seem to age and regress. Morphing two photos from the same photo shoot reanimates the movement between the poses.

Three photos are best for 'flip' or natural dissolve transitions, although four can be achieved with some expected additional blending. The lens has a 49° viewing angle, which means that the phase has to complete in this zone when moving side to side before it resets back to the first frame. So encoding four photos makes each frame have only 12° of hang-time before the next image will begin to appear. This causes more interaction in the images, which is sometimes nice, sometimes not. It depends on the project. I often use the 4th frame as a texture so that the blending adds nice elements into the other frames. Think of balloons for a birthday, flowers for a wedding, etc.

When choosing the actual photos, keep in mind that large areas of solid colors (especially black and white) will allow the next frame to appear sooner in those zones, and the previous frame will delay longer. This is called the 'ghosting' effect, and again, it's sometimes nice, sometimes not. Generally we want texture over texture and both to have the same tonal range. If your project requires portrait orientation, which most do, then note the orientation of the images you provide. Sometimes people will send two head shots (portrait) and then a group image that is oriented wide (landscape), and we have to either lose people on the edges or add data to the top and bottom. Each image has to fit the dimension of the project as a single frame. Please allow me to crop them into place, send your originals, but just keep this in mind when picking them out. Part of my service is to make each frame transition nicely into the next, and so the extra stretch and wiggle room allows this to happen. I try and align edges and elements within the compositions to 'play nice' with each other over the course of the transition, and this can really only effectively be done with one image superimposed over the other. But that's my job, and I like doing it, so leave that part up to me.

Beyond four images, they have to be similar in nature, like frames from a movie clip. We can encode upwards of 60 individual frames, but this would be for more complex 3D animations. Smooth effects can be generated using only 20 frames. If you are thinking about designing an animation, keep in mind that more distance equals greater blurring. Sometimes it's better to let some elements of the animation simply flip/dissolve into new position than to have it move frame by frame into place. For instance, wheels spinning on a bicycle is effective, but to have the bicycle itself move across the frame would be less desirable.

Feel free to contact me with any questions. I look forward to working with you on your project!