In a previous post,  I wrote about the power of a series of photos in telling a story, you can read that post here.  Now I’ll take a slightly different route in telling a story and delve into the video end of things.

First of all, newborns and baby portraits look great.  But there’s also a necessity to get some perspective, to see how small those precious newborns really are.  This is why in a lot of portraits, the newborn is pictured in the arms of one of the parents.

Another way to gain perspective in comparative terms is to take a picture at a set time every month.  There are newborn baby portrait studios (including this one) that offer such packages of pictures.  The way it works is that each month the newborn baby is photographed in the same chair, beanbag, or other prop.  This creates an easy way to actually visualize the growth and changes they take on during the year, because we all know that first year is full of an enormous amount of change and growth.  So at the end of the year, you’re left with twelve or thirteen beautiful images that show how much that little bundle of joy has changed from month to month.

Now, a cool way to display and share these pictures is by video.  The key is to get the prop that is being used to remain stagnant in each picture so the only change in each picture is the baby.

I did a picture series like this with our first child.  This was pre-studio days, so we just set her up on the couch in our living room.  And just in case the couch wasn’t enough to create some perspective we also added a Pluto stuffie.

On the video end of things, you can really use any video editing software.  I created the video in Adobe After Effect and used a BCC morph filter.  Without getting too technical, this filter allows you to set key frames picking specific spots on each picture and then morphing from one picture to the next.  You really wouldn’t need to do this, it’s just a special effect with which I wanted to experiment.

Here’s the video…enjoy!