Recreating the past from films.

So I had this odd idea today.

How many times have you been watching some old B&W footage shot at an airfield and strained to spot a building or feature seen for a brief moment in the background of a single frame?

I caught myself doing this today watching a Tiger Moth take off from Booker and then it suddenly dawned on me - the shot is panning so over the space of about 5 seconds you get a nice sweep south to north of the technical site. So, capture each frame, overlay them matching up features and with the careful use of the mask tool, mask out the subject in each frame. Voila! A nice background panorama of the airfield.

I did two quick attempts so they're a little rough and the quality of the original film plays a big part.

First is from a YouTube clip of gliders landing. Nothing spectacular but I thought it gave a nice shot of the top of a hangar.

Second is RAF Booker just after the war. The aircraft on the right was the one taking off in the scene and was being tracked hence the left hand side of the panorama has motion blur from where the camera followed it. I just about managed to mask out the moth in each frame but had to fill in a few gaps.

I wonder what other films are out there we could recreate airfield panorama's from

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Excellent work OneEigth! You realise of course, we'll all be giving it a go now! Actually, a really good idea - it's always the simple ones which are the best. I like the resulting panoramic effect, for me it works really well. Nice one!

Chris

PNK;69885 wrote:

I spent many hours stitching aerials from the original Get Mapping site around 1999. Slightly easier than moving images I'll bet.

Even easier still when you have a program to stitch those aerials automatically.

Nice results OEB, you have more patience than I have!