I’m very happy to say that I have all the material I need now to finish this project and it’s only the 14th! The images from my stereo cam have all come through and I’ve begun turning them all into moving gifs. The camera itself is super basic and more or less works just like any other 35mm point and shoot, except that it takes three exposures at once that are fit into one and a half frames in portrait orientation. Unlike my other stereo camera I was using last year it has three lenses instead of four and has no settings to change ISO which can be a bit annoying, but what makes this camera better for my purposes by a landslide is the fact that it cost a fraction of the price and size which makes it a lot easier to just take everywhere with you, has an inbuilt flash,  and is new so I’d like to think I don’t have to worry about the thing breaking on me…

It can be a really tedious process turning these images into moving gifs and then trying to wrangle those gifs inside Premier when you’ve got to do lots at once and try and make them look as consistent as possible timing and motion wise. After they’ve been converted to video timelines too it makes them really hideous to work with and Premier seems to like stretching the first frame out much longer than it should be, but is a necessary step if you want compatible material.

The process of making the gifs themselves (which I hope is follow-able from the screenshots above) more or less just involves cropping the larger image to fit individual frames and then duplicating the layer, lowering opacity and lining the next frame up over the last. You can decide here which part of the image is going to be moving and which part if relatively still, but most of the time you want to line up whatever’s in the foreground and then leave the background to shift.

Once you’ve done this for as many frames as you have (in my case three) you then just need to make a frame animation and choose which layers are visible in order from left to right. After that you’ve got to convert this to a video timeline to use in Premier and simply export it out.

In my case, this process is the easy part. Fitting these things to moving film and trying to keep visual and rhythmic consistency is really annoying sometimes but also worth it when you’re satisfied with the end product.