Americans Paul Falkenberg and Lewis Jacobs made ‘Lincoln Speaks at Gettysburg’ entirely out of nineteenth-century engravings, 1950. Belgium’s Henri Starc began imparting dramatic film form to still images in 1936, and his lyric ‘World of Paul Delvaux’ (1947) is an acknowledged classic. “Curt Oertel made his ‘Michaelangelo,’ with important storytelling use of still material, in 1940 (released as Robert Flaherty’s ‘The Titan’ around 1949). In a 1961 letter to the New York Times, photographer-filmmaker Louis Clyde Stoumen surveyed earlier uses of the technique by himself and others: This one-hour Abraham Lincoln documentary used period photographs, illustrations, artwork, newspapers and documents "animated" by the camera on an elaborate flatbed motion picture apparatus, and the descriptive term "stills in motion" for the technique was used in NBC's publicity and in the trade by the early 1960s. Lincoln," first telecast 11 February 1959. Īmerica's television audience had seen extensive use of the technique in NBC's "Meet Mr.
Winner of the Palme d'or at the Cannes Film Festival and nominated for an Academy Award, City of Gold used animation camera techniques to slowly pan and zoom across archival still pictures of Canada's Klondike Gold Rush. He has also cited the 1957 National Film Board of Canada documentary City of Gold, co-directed by Colin Low and Wolf Koenig, as a prior example of the technique. Instead of showing a large static photo on screen, the Ken Burns effect crops to a detail, then pans across the image.īurns has credited documentary filmmaker Jerome Liebling for teaching him how still photographs could be incorporated into documentary films. The zooming and panning across photographs gives the feeling of motion, and keeps the viewer visually engaged. For example, to segue from one person in the story to another, a clip might open with a close-up of one person in a photo, then zoom out so that another person in the photo becomes visible. The effect can be used as a transition between clips as well. By employing simulated parallax, a two-dimensional image can appear as 3D, with the viewpoint seeming to enter the picture and move among the figures. For example, in a photograph of a baseball team, one might slowly pan across the faces of the players and come to a rest on the player the narrator is discussing. Action is given to still photographs by slowly zooming in on subjects of interest and panning from one subject to another. The technique is principally used when film or video material is not available.