Freezing a movie frame with a painting effect

That’s an effect that we have seen a lot in westerns and such.

The recipe used to make a photo look like a painting:

• Find the edges of the image with the Sobel algorithm. You obtain what looks like a black and white hand-drawing of the photo.

• Multiply the image array to make the colors flashier, and add the contours obtained at the previous step.

The final clip will be the concatenation of three part: the part before the effect, the part with the effect, and the part after the effect. The part with the effect is obtained as follows:

• Take the frame to freeze and make a “painted image” of it. Make it a clip.

• Add a text clip saying “Audrey” to the “painted image” clip.

• Overlay the painted clip over the original frame, but make it appear and disappear with a fading effect.

Here you are for the code:

"""Requires scikit-image installed (for ``vfx.painting``)."""

from moviepy import *


# WE TAKE THE SUBCLIPS WHICH ARE 2 SECONDS BEFORE & AFTER THE FREEZE

charade = VideoFileClip("../../videos/charade.mp4")
tfreeze = convert_to_seconds(19.21)  # Time of the freeze, 19'21

clip_before = charade.subclip(tfreeze - 2, tfreeze)
clip_after = charade.subclip(tfreeze, tfreeze + 2)


# THE FRAME TO FREEZE

im_freeze = charade.to_ImageClip(tfreeze)
painting = charade.fx(vfx.painting, saturation=1.6, black=0.006).to_ImageClip(tfreeze)

txt = TextClip("Audrey", font="Amiri-regular", font_size=35)

painting_txt = (
    CompositeVideoClip([painting, txt.set_pos((10, 180))])
    .add_mask()
    .with_duration(3)
    .crossfadein(0.5)
    .crossfadeout(0.5)
)

# FADEIN/FADEOUT EFFECT ON THE PAINTED IMAGE

painting_fading = CompositeVideoClip([im_freeze, painting_txt])

# FINAL CLIP AND RENDERING

final_clip = concatenate_videoclips(
    [clip_before, painting_fading.with_duration(3), clip_after]
)

final_clip.write_videofile(
    "../../audrey.avi", fps=charade.fps, codec="mpeg4", audio_bitrate="3000k"
)