Black Nights Film Festival is proud to partner with FotoInMotion, a new tool that will automatically turn still images into immersive short-form videos. But what will be the future of tools for digital content creation? FotoInMotion partners will shed some light upon the trends!

“Visual content” has become an all-encompassing category that can mean different things depending on who’s creating or consuming or selling it. Still most of us can agree about what is and what is not a photograph: whether printed or pixelated, color or black and white, fine art or breaking news or the sunset shot from your summer vacation.

At the same time, of course, the digital revolution has changed everything. For better and worse. By most estimates, more than one trillion images are taken a year, up from 80 billion in 2000. Our smartphones and social media mean anyone can be a published photographer — anywhere, anytime. That’s the good news and bad news. It’s bad news not only for those who try to make a living from it, but also for the rest of us who might not see the best or most relevant images in the constant stream of often mediocre (or pointless) photographs.

Still, a whole new generation of multimedia storytellers and technologists are helping to figure out how to take advantage of the opportunities the digital revolution offers photography. The advertising, entertainment, art and information industries are pushing the boundaries around 3D imaging, augmented reality, and new formats like cinemagraphs that partially animate images.

Some of it is pretty cool, but much of it is not really photography — that unique experience that a still image offers by capturing a moment, scene or something else that will never be quite the same.

FotoInMotion is a new European Commission-backed project to build a digital tool to bridge the divide between the timeless power of photography and the new potential offered by information technology. The aim of the FotoInMotion tool is to use automation to efficiently turn any photograph into an immersive video for storytelling, journalistic and marketing purposes — a way to make great photographers come to life and transmit information in the endless stream of visual content.

The FotoInMotion desktop and mobile tool will allow both creative content producers and the creative public to efficiently produce high-quality videos from still photography, relying on AI-driven automated editing functions and dynamic effects.

Black Night Film Festival is a key partner in the project, overseeing a major pilot program to test and exploit the tool during its annual festival. Over the coming weeks, there will be more articles from FotoInMotion’s partners, who hail from six industry sectors and six different European countries, exploring what it means to be a visual storyteller. And what it means to be a photograph.