Chapter 7. Working with Stills
Speaking of stills, we'll take a jug of that White Lightning, please ...whoops, wrong kind of still. From the early zoetropes and kinetoscopes through to today's IMAX and Blu-Ray, video really boils down to a series of still images passing so quickly through our vision that our minds perceive continuous motion.
Still images, however, still have value in movies beyond their fleeting passage as a frame of video. Numerous movies (for example, Hello, Dolly!) and TV shows (such as NCIS) have employed frozen images to lead into a scene or close out a scene, or both. Ken Burns's documentaries on PBS, where still images of historic events are brought to life through panning and zooming, did a lot to popularize the documentary far beyond PBS's normal audience. Using iMovie's Ken Burns Effect, you can achieve the same effects in your movies.
Another common use of still images in video is the "news commentary," where a photograph fills the screen while audio commentary continues. Yet another is the venerable slideshow, a staple in so many pieces of software (iPhoto, iDVD, Photoshop, Keynote, and others ad nauseum).
As you make more movies, or even as you watch more movies and television with an eye toward how ...
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