Still Images

You don't need expensive digital video cameras in order to make a movie. In fact, you'd be amazed at what you can do with nothing more than snapshots taken with your regular camera. The secret is a technique known as "Rostrum Camera".

It's a technique used extensively by documentary film makers. You see, when you are making a movie about the real past (as opposed to a historical story) you can't go back and film it. You'll probably only have old still images available. So how do you make your documentary look like a movie and not like a slide show?

The original answer was to build a frame and mount a movie camera on it so you could zoom in and out of your still image. The frame was called a "rostrum" and it gave birth to a technique you'll be all too familiar with. See the examples on this page.

This picture shows a simple rostrum. Notice the two big lights and the pole which allows the camera to be moved up and down.

Nowadays you don't need an actual rostrum. The technique can be simulated in some movie editing software and the best one for this is Revelation Sight and Sound from Logotron.

Here's a simple example using the same photographs that were used in the slide shows in the Music page.

Slide Show 3 consists of still images but they seem to be moving because the camera moves across each picture. You don't need an actual rostrum camera these days. What you need is video editing software that allows you to put rostrum camera movement onto your own still images.

And here's an example of the technique used to create a simple documentary about the Second World War using some still images that were available.

Documentary appears to be a movie but there is not one piece of moving image footage in it. The whole thing is made from still images.

Both of these files were created for children to illustrate rostrum camera movement. Now check out these professional examples - remember, there's not a moving image in any of them:

Friends - trailer for the fifth series.
Jump5 - a pop video.
Franken Hi - A spoof by Microsoft about how the rostrum technique was invented.

There's another fantastic use for the rostrum camera technique. It's called "Digital Storytelling".
Read on or choose from the menu on the left.