Hand machined mechanical pencils

Freeze frame stop motion (10/07/15)

One Direction's video for You & I features a "freeze frame" effect where the moving character jumps into their frozen image and moves on. Here's their official video - you can see the effect from about 2:50 onwards:

There's some debate over whether they pinched this idea from another group's video, namely Clubfeet's Everything You Wanted:

Either way, it's a neat effect, so I had a go at imitating it. First, I recorded some video of me walking past the camera, with a few jumps. I stuck this into Premiere, and added markers at the positions where I wanted the frozen frames to occur. I then exported a complete frame from the video at each of the markers - use PNG since we'll need transparency later.

I manually removed all the background in each of the frozen frames, leaving only me. Here's each of the frames (shown against a black background for clarity):

     

I created a few more video layers in Premiere and imported each of the frames. They stop at their respective markers, so it looks like my moving image has seamlessly merged with the frozen image. Here's a shot of Premiere's timeline.

Video 1 is the main (moving) video, and video 2,3,4 are tracks for the frozen images.

Finally, here's the result: