On this How It's Made – PEG Producer, Craig, is taking us through how we brought some historic downtown photos to life for the Greater Akron Chamber's 2019 Annual Meeting Video.

Video Transcription: 

Hey guys! Welcome to another edition of How It’s Made with PEG. I’m Craig, and today I’m going to show you how we brought to life some historic photos of downtown Akron for a project we did with the Greater Akron Chamber for their 2019 Annual Meeting.

Let’s start by watching a portion of the final video.

[Music & VO from Final Video]

“Or do you embrace your past and build on it—
Respect the work of those before you,
Who learned from their lessons ahead of our start.
Our secret advantage in Greater Akron—
The colors on our canvas run deep.
We’ve seen the highs, the lows,
And heard all the critics who said we’d never come back.”

Alright, so we had four iconic historic photos of downtown Akron, and we wanted to do something a little more special than just zooming or fading them in and out. We wanted to give them depth—to bring them to life.

There’s this really cool technique called a displacement map, which gives flat images the illusion of 3D depth by simulating camera movement. Let me show you how it works.

We start with the original photo in Photoshop. Then we create a black-and-white reference image—our displacement map. In this map, black represents areas furthest from the camera, and white represents areas closest. After Effects uses this data to simulate depth and parallax, creating that realistic motion.

Take this example: when I lower the opacity of the image, you can see the map beneath it. The brighter corners of the building feel closer, while the grays and blacks fade into the background. We even painted elements like the light post and people in the foreground to enhance that sense of depth.

Here’s another one: this was a simple pan around a street corner. We painted the edges and ground to create depth. I’ll show you what that looked like in After Effects in a bit.

For this one, you’d think it would just be a simple gradient from white to black since it’s a skyward shot. But to enhance realism, we painted more detail—lightening the corners of the buildings just slightly. Subtle changes like that really sell the parallax effect.

And here's one of the Civic Theatre. I initially tried something more complex, like animating the signs, but it didn’t quite work. A lot of this process is trial and error—experimenting until something looks right. What we ended up with was a simple gradient from one corner to the other, making the people rise up and the buildings stay back.

Let’s hop into After Effects and I’ll show you how it all comes together.

Here’s the composition. There's a lot of animation going on, but I’ll start with just the displacement map effect.

Here’s the image. As I scrub through the timeline, you’ll notice the camera move. After Effects looks at the grayscale values in the displacement map to determine what appears closer or farther from the camera.

You can see how the peak of this building moves faster than the rest—that’s because it’s painted whiter on the map. We also added extra elements like smoke. It’s just a simple smokestack graphic, but with some blend modes and masking, it fits right in.

There’s also added details like falling ashes or snow, sound design, blur effects, and light leaks—all layered together to make it feel like a drone slowly approaching and jibbing down over the city.

Here's another example. This street corner feels like the camera is walking down the sidewalk. To help sell that effect, we moved these two figures outward to create a “path” for the camera. We also added lens blur to simulate depth of field changes—making it feel like the lens is racking focus mid-shot.

We could’ve gone with a straightforward zoom, but since our last shot used a tilt, we decided to mix it up and do more of an orbit-style camera move here.

Jumping to another example—you’ll see how the same effect plays out. You might notice I cut out this car so it could subtly move, while the foreground buildings rise more quickly than those in the background. It creates a great illusion of space and motion.

This effect can get a bit crazy if you push it too far, so it’s really about fine-tuning and making it feel subtle and natural. In this Civic Theatre example, the people in front rise, the camera blurs and refocuses, and we added some lighting and adjustment layers to draw the eye toward the center of the frame.

So that’s how we pulled off that effect!

Thanks so much for watching this edition of How It’s Made with PEG. I’m Craig, and we’ll see you in the next one.

[Music fades out]