2.5-Dimensional Slideshow

Those of you who visit my Flickr page may have already seen this, but a lot of work went into it, so I make no apologies for airing it again. All of the birds in this presentation were photographed in East Kent, and all of them were wild (even the Kestrel):

 

I say a lot of work went into it, but how much? Well, to create the pseudo-3D effect, you first have to isolate the foreground element (the bird) from the background. This is done in Photoshop by duplicating the background layer, adding a mask and painting it so only the bird is revealed. You then have to remove the bird from the background layer by careful application of the clone brush (or the Content-Aware Fill tool if you're lucky enough to own a newer version of PS). The next step is to import these layers into Adobe After Effects, place a suitable distance (z-space) between the foreground and background elements, create a virtual camera to track in (or out), choose positions for your start and end keyframes, decide on the length of time it takes the camera to move between these keyframes, and render the animation.

...and that's just one shot completed; now you have to do the same again for all the other images.

Here's a behind-the-scenes screenshot showing a typical camera move being set up in After Effects:

There's a lot of trial and error involved in getting it just right, but the process does become simpler once you've worked through a couple of images.

While synching all the shots to the cues in the soundtrack*, I found I had more clips than I needed, so here - for those who are interested in extras - are the "Deleted Scenes":

If I haven't put you off and you want to try making your own 2.5D slideshow, a step-by-step PDF tutorial can be downloaded from this page:
http://www.daynw.com/3d-for-2d-moving-image-slideshow-effect-tutorial/
Note: Even making just an 85-second video was very time-consuming; this is not the sort of project you can knock off in a single afternoon.

Incidentally, if anyone knows where I might find a tutorial that explains how to replicate all the After Effects steps in Blender, I'd very much appreciate it if you left a link in the comments.

*The music for the slideshow is of course Aquarium from Saint-Saëns's Le carnaval des animaux, used to such memorable effect in Terrence Malick's 1978 film Days of Heaven.