Napier Port — AI archive animation
Historic photographs of Napier Port become a moving journey across 150 years. Lucid Lab’s role was the AI animation: bringing still images into motion and creating the time-lapse transitions between them.
The brief
Help an existing photographic record feel continuous without losing its connection to the source images. The movement needed to carry the viewer through time while allowing the archive itself to remain recognisable.
The challenge
Archive photographs were never made as adjacent frames of one shot. Viewpoint, lenses, structures, ships, weather, and image quality change across the record. Turning those differences into motion can easily create details that were never present.
The approach
Lucid Lab animated the historic stills and built transitions that move between moments in the port’s development. The work uses AI as a bridge between photographs, with editing and timing shaping the larger journey.
Lucid Lab’s contribution is the AI animation of the historic stills and the time-lapse transitions shown in the finished video.
Contribution
The archive animation and time-lapse transition work in the video above was created by Lucid Lab.
See the historically reviewed reenactment work in Once We Were Children, or explore AI video production in Auckland for other ways to bring difficult-to-film material into view.
Preparing an archive-animation brief
Start with the original photographs, their known dates or order, and permission to use them. Mark which structures, people and other details must remain faithful to the source. Where the record is uncertain, leave that uncertainty visible rather than filling it with an invented historical claim.
Decide whether each shot should animate one photograph or transition between different moments. These are different visual jobs. Agree who will review the historical detail, how the sequence will be described to viewers, and where it will appear in the finished production.
Use the AI production brief checklist to plan references, approvals and delivery. The Napier Port example demonstrates archive animation and transitions, rather than a claim that generated movement is original footage.
