Big Idea

The argument in one line.

Any flat image can become a moving 3D scene in DaVinci Resolve's Fusion tab by slicing it into layers, spacing those layers apart in Z-space, and pushing an eased camera through the stack.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…

You already edit in DaVinci Resolve and want a repeatable Fusion node workflow for cinematic parallax intros or B-roll.
You make true-crime, documentary, or news-recap style videos and need a way to make a static photo collage feel alive.
You want the exact color-grade and effects stack (LUT, vignette, zoom blur, grain, dust) used to make a flat composite look filmed.

SKIP IF…

You edit exclusively in Premiere or After Effects and have no interest in Fusion's node-based compositing.
You're looking for an AI tool that generates the animation for you rather than a manual technique you build by hand.

TL;DR

The full version, fast.

Zane Hoyer shows how he turns flat images into cinematic 3D animations entirely inside DaVinci Resolve's Fusion tab, no other software. The core technique: wire a Camera, Merge 3D, and Render node together, give every image its own Image Plane, and space the planes apart in Z so a camera push creates parallax. Drop shadows and blur sell the depth; a hand-drawn callout card and pop-in text are built with a keyframed polygon spline. He rebuilds the whole rig a second time on a portrait photo to prove it's a repeatable template, then finishes both scenes with the same color, vignette, zoom-blur, grain, and dust-overlay stack that makes the composite read as filmed footage rather than a collage.

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Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:00 – 00:15

01 · Cold open — the pitch

Zane states the promise over a shot of him working outside; on-screen text pops in sync with his first word.

00:15 – 03:38

02 · Building the base 3D parallax collage

In Fusion he wires Camera to Merge 3D to Render, then adds an image plane per collage asset (background, paper clippings, farmer photo, pill bottles, foreground cutout), spacing each one apart in Z and adding drop shadow and blur to sell depth.

03:38 – 04:47

03 · Sponsor: Envato's AI stock-to-video workflow

Zane explains why he now starts AI generations from a real stock photo via Envato's library and Gen AI tools instead of prompting from scratch, to avoid a robotic look, then points to the description link.

04:47 – 08:08

04 · Finishing scene one: extra depth, callout card, and text

He adds a couple more image planes farther back to deepen the tunnel effect, then builds a hand-drawn callout card by keyframing a polygon spline's length and roughing its edges with Erode/Dilate, followed by pop-in text captions.

08:08 – 09:20

05 · Assembling the composite and animating the camera

The scene and text merges are nested together, scaled and positioned as a unit, and the camera's zoom is keyframed from a wide start to a tight push-in with an eased spline.

09:20 – 11:02

06 · Cinematic color grade and finishing effects

On the Edit page he applies contrast, temperature, and saturation on an adjustment clip, adds a LUT, then layers a vignette, center-sharp zoom blur, film grain, and a screen-mode dust overlay plus a multiply-mode ink splatter.

11:02 – 14:32

07 · Second scene: portrait parallax and graphic bar reveal

He rebuilds the same three-node parallax rig on a single farmer portrait, reuses the callout card and text from scene one, animates the camera push, and adds keyframed solid-color bars that ease into a letterbox reveal.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

A 3D parallax scene in Fusion always starts with the same three nodes: Camera, Merge 3D, and Render, wired Camera to Merge to Render to Media Out.
Every image needs its own Image Plane node before it can be positioned in 3D space — a flat image can't be moved in Z on its own.
The parallax illusion comes almost entirely from spacing: the farther apart image planes sit from the camera, the stronger the depth effect when the camera moves.
A Drop Shadow node on near layers and a Blur node on far layers sell depth more convincingly than position alone.
Objects with a literal hole cut in them can be placed right in front of the camera to add a foreground layer of parallax the viewer passes through.
A hand-drawn callout line is built by keyframing a Polygon spline's Length from 0 to full, then roughing the edges with Erode/Dilate so it looks pen-drawn instead of vector-clean.
Camera moves are keyframed in three steps: set the start position, jump to the end frame, change the zoom, then select the spline and press S to auto-smooth the ease.
A low-strength Waviness node on a drop shadow adds gentle drift that reads as 'alive' without becoming distracting.
The cinematic finishing pass is a fixed, repeatable stack: contrast, temperature and saturation pushed up on an adjustment clip, then a LUT layered on top.
Vignette, a center-sharp zoom blur, film grain, and a screen-mode dust overlay are each subtle alone but read as unmistakably cinematic stacked together.
Film grain needs active correction: pushing opacity and strength up first to make the texture visible, then dialing opacity back down, avoids an overly noisy result.
The same three-node parallax rig works as a fast, repeatable template on a completely different photo — the technique, not the assets, is what's reusable.
Reusing built elements (like copying a callout-card polygon from one scene into another) keeps a multi-scene video visually consistent without redrawing shared graphics.
Solid-color bars keyframed from off-frame to a locked end position, then eased in, create a letterbox-style graphic reveal that reads as designed rather than a rough cut.

Takeaway

The parallax build order that turns flat images into 3D motion

FUSION TECHNIQUE

The whole cinematic effect comes from four repeatable moves: separate every element into its own image plane, space them apart in Z, add shadow and blur to sell depth, then push an eased camera through the stack, not from any single fancy plugin.

02Building the base 3D parallax collage

Every Fusion 3D scene starts with the same three nodes: Render, Merge 3D, and Camera, wired Camera to Merge to Render to Media Out, before any image gets added.
Each image needs its own Image Plane node to enter 3D space; spacing planes progressively farther from the camera is what creates the parallax when the camera later moves.
A Drop Shadow node on the closest layers and a Blur node on the farthest ones sell depth more than position alone — shadow implies floating, blur implies distance.

04Finishing scene one: extra depth, callout card, and text

Stacking a few more image planes even farther back, then blurring the closest one, turns a shallow layer stack into a tunnel that reads as continuous depth once the camera pushes through it.
A hand-drawn callout line is built by keyframing a Polygon spline's Length from 0 to full, then running it through Erode/Dilate with mismatched X/Y values so straight vector edges look like an actual pen stroke.
Copy-pasting an existing text and image-plane pair is faster than rebuilding each caption from scratch — headline, location line, and background chip are all reusable units.

05Assembling the composite and animating the camera

Nesting Merge 3D compositions, a scene merge feeding a text merge, keeps a complex build organized instead of piling every node into one graph.
Camera moves are keyframed in three steps: set the start position, jump to the end frame, change the zoom, then select the spline and press S to auto-smooth the ease.
A low-strength Waviness node on a layer's drop shadow adds gentle drift that reads as alive without becoming distracting.

06Cinematic color grade and finishing effects

The finishing pass is a fixed, repeatable stack on an adjustment clip: contrast, temperature, and saturation pushed up first, then a LUT layered on top for the final color signature.
Vignette, a zoom blur that keeps the center sharp, film grain, and a screen-mode dust overlay are stacked in sequence — each one alone is subtle, but together they read as cinematic.
Grain needs active correction, not a single setting: pushing opacity and strength up first makes the texture visible, then dialing opacity back down keeps it from looking noisy.

07Second scene: portrait parallax and graphic bar reveal

The same three-node parallax rig, background and subject on separate image planes pulled apart in Z, works as a fast, repeatable template for an unrelated photo.
Reusing assets across scenes, like copying the callout-card polygon from scene one into scene two, keeps a multi-scene video visually consistent without redrawing shared elements.
Solid-color bars keyframed from off-frame to a locked end position, then eased in, create a letterbox-style graphic reveal that reads as designed rather than a rough cut.

Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

Fusion tab: DaVinci Resolve's node-based compositing environment, separate from the Edit and Color pages, used for building layered 2D/3D effects and animations.
Merge 3D node: A Fusion node that combines multiple 3D elements (image planes, cameras) into a single scene that a render node can output.
Image Plane: A Fusion 3D node that projects a flat 2D image onto a plane so it can be positioned, rotated, and scaled in 3D space.
Parallax: The visual effect where objects at different depths appear to move at different speeds relative to each other as the camera moves, creating an illusion of 3D depth.
Erode/Dilate: A Fusion effect that shrinks (erodes) or expands (dilates) the edges of a shape or mask; used here with mismatched horizontal/vertical values to rough up a clean vector line.
LUT (Look-Up Table): A preset color-mapping file applied to footage to shift its overall color and contrast toward a specific cinematic look.
Zoom blur: An effect that blurs an image radially outward from a center point, mimicking the look of a lens zooming during exposure.
Waviness node: A Fusion node that adds oscillating, wave-like motion to a layer, used here at low strength to make a shadow drift subtly.
Adjustment clip: A transparent clip placed above other clips in the timeline whose effects (color, grain, blur) apply to everything beneath it.

Resources

Things they pointed at.

00:15linkAsset pack (Google Drive) ↗

03:38toolEnvato (Gen AI stock + editing suite) ↗

06:52productText animation pack (peejent) ↗

Quotables

Lines you could clip.

00:00

“I've built up so many cinematic DaVinci Resolve effects in my tool belt that I can take any random images and turn them into a cinematic masterpiece.”

clean thesis statement, works as a cold open for a repurposed clip→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote

03:38

“When you prompt a scene or audio from scratch, it usually falls apart. It can sometimes feel robotic and fake. But when you give it something real to start with, like stock images or videos, you literally can no longer tell it's AI.”

a standalone AI-workflow opinion that clips cleanly out of the sponsor read→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote

14:17

“These animations are not that hard to make at all, but they look super cinematic, and not very many people put in the time to make their animations look this good. So this is how you can stand out.”

closing thesis and payoff line, works as an outro clip→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote

The Script

Word for word.

Read-along

Don't just watch it. Burn it in.

See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.

story

I've built up so many cinematic DaVinci Resolve effects in my tool belt that I can take any random images and turn them into a cinematic masterpiece. In this video, I'm gonna show you how to do that. Seth Butler was poisoned on his farm by a man who goes by aunt Tim.

He is no joke. All the assets are below. Go ahead and give this video a like.

So our first step is to go to effects, and we're gonna drag on a fusion composition clip. Then we can head into the fusion tab, and we can quickly build out our three d environment. So we're gonna drag on a render, a merge, and then a camera.

Camera goes to the merge, merge to the render, and render to the media out. And then we can throw our merge into this viewer here. Now as you can see, I've collected a bunch of assets here, and all of these are in the asset pack in the description.

So I'm gonna drag on my background here, then and I'm gonna also drag on all these paper pieces because we're just gonna kinda lay them out. So we're gonna connect all of these assets to this merge node.

And to do that, we just need to drag in an image plane, and then we can drag our first asset onto that image plane, and then the image plane to the merge. If we drag our camera back, you can see our assets. I'm gonna drag on another image plane and connect our background to that, and then connect it to the merge, and then select the image plane, and we'll drag it back a bit.

Select the transform and scale it up really big. And I actually want this asset to be in this corner, so I can select it, hit shift space, and add in a transform. And then we can just hit flip, select the image plane, and drag it into this corner.

And then again, the further we put these apart, the more of a parallax three d effect you'll get. Drag in another image plane. So I want this piece to kinda cover up half the screen.

So we can select the image plane, select transform. I'm gonna rotate it, and I'm going to increase the scale. And then I can zoom in over here and place it where I want it.

Gonna add in another image plane, connect to this one, select the image plane, and we can place this down here just for another layer. Just increase the size and just place it at the bottom. Again, we wanna create lots of space in between each object so that when we zoom in with the camera, we get a nice three d parallax effect.

Add in another image plane, select the image plane, and we can drag the man here and bring him down. I'm gonna select the media in, hit shift space, and add in a drop shadow.

And now we have a shadow, so it looks a little bit better. I'm also gonna select the media end of our background and hit shift space and add in a blur, and then increase the blur size. And we can always test how it's gonna look by just dragging our camera forward and backward, and it kinda shows you the three d parallax effect.

Gonna add in another image plane, connect this. This is kinda the main news article we're using, so I want this to be in front. So I'm gonna size it down, bring it forward, something like that.

Add in another image plane and connect this to here. These are the pill bottles.

So I'm gonna place them in front of this news article. So I'm just gonna size it down and then come over to my viewer here and drag it forward and place it just in front, rotate it using the z axis. And again, we can select this and hit shift space, add in a drop shadow, and we'll get that shadow for this as well.

Now we have our last one here, so we can drag in another image plane, connect this to here, and this to the merge. Select the image plane, and we're gonna drag this all the way forward.

We're gonna drag our camera back. So this object has a hole in it so that we can place it in front of our camera, and it's gonna just create more depth. So if we place it like right here, when we zoom in our camera, you can see it gives us a pretty cool three d look.

So this one I want to be a little bit closer and I'll play place it down a little bit and I'm gonna select both these, hit command copy, click and paste it, and bring it to the merge.

Now with this one, I'm going to drag it further back.

Now real quick, before we dive into adding the final cinematic effects, I want to talk about my assets, specifically assets I use for my clients, and how I started using AI plus real footage to get super realistic results. As you know, when you prompt a scene or audio from scratch, it usually falls apart. It can sometimes feel robotic and fake.

But when you give it something real to start with, like stock images or videos, you literally can no longer tell it's AI. But that can create another problem. What do you feed it?

And that is what I use Envato for, the sponsor of today's video. Envato is my all in one creative toolkit because they just integrated a mass of suite of gen AI tools. Instead of prompting something from scratch, my workflow now starts with a high end stock asset.

So I start by looking through the library and grab a high quality four k stock image. And then I use their image edit tool to edit it however I want. And then I bring it into video gem to add cinematic motion.

Same thing for audio. I'll scroll through the audio library, and then I use sound gen to layer custom depth over it. You get the high quality sound of a real asset, but it's tailored to you with AI.

So as you can see, I have everything in place, but I only need one license. So click the link below in the description to upgrade your workflow, and let's get back to the lesson. And with this one, we can drag it further back this time, and then I'm going to increase the size.

So you can see it creates kind of a bigger tunnel, and then I'm gonna select that and hit shift space and add in a blur so that the foreground one is a little bit more blurry. And then you'll see when we grab our camera and drag it back, when we zoom in now, you can see we have multiple layers of paper that zoom in to the main shot eventually.

And again, right now it looks horrible, but once we add a bunch of effects to it, it's gonna look super cinematic. Right now, we're just kinda piecing it together, and then we can adjust things later. Now, something we're gonna do is build out the callout card and the text.

So for that, I'm just gonna drag on a new merge three d so that we can kinda stay a little bit more organized. I'm gonna drag on a background. I'm gonna throw this background into the viewer.

I hit shift space and add in a polygon. Right click here, remove polygon line one, and we can just basically click out the path of our call out card. So I'll click here, here, here, here, and then go like this.

So now we can select each corner and round it out just like this, and then we can adjust it to look a little bit better.

So this is gonna be like that. One, I'm going to kinda bring like this. So now we can increase the border width and I'm gonna select the background and change it to white.

I'm gonna add in our erode dilate, holding down shift, bring this into here, uncheck this box, and I'm going to increase the size of the x and decrease the size of the y. And as you can see, it just makes it look a little bit more like it was actually drawn.

So we can go to the first frame, select the polygon, and drag our length all the way down and keyframe it. Then we can come to the frame where we want it to end.

So I don't know, maybe frame 80 and increase the length. Go to the spline, select a box over this and press s to smooth everything out. And I'm just going to bring this side up so that it starts a little bit faster.

So now if we watch that back, it looks like that. All we have to do to bring it to our merge is to add in an image plane, connect the background to the image plane and this to the merge.

Now we can throw this merge into the viewer and as you can see there's our line. Now we can add in some text, so I'm gonna add in another image plane. I'm gonna hit shift space and add a letter and I'm gonna select letter zoom in.

This is a text animation that looks really good. All of the text animations I use are in the description. I'm gonna add that in, connect this to the image plane, and connect this to the merge.

As you can see, our text appeared. I'm gonna write in something like farmer poisoned. It's like my image plane and now bring this up just like this.

And then I can also increase the size just like that. Now I can select these, hit command c, click away, command v, and connect it to this merge.

I can select transform on the image plane and size it down and drag it down like this. And then for this one, can write something like North Of Canada.

Now one more thing I'm gonna add is another background, another image plane, connect this to here and this to here. I'm going to select the background and select this rectangle mask so that we can increase so that we can decrease the height and increase the width.

And we can place this over top of North Of Canada. We're also gonna drag it back a little bit so that's just behind it. And we can change this color to kind of a dark red like that.

Now one thing I forgot to do is just add a drop shadow to everything so we can just select the background, add in a drop shadow, and then do the same for the rest. Now to connect all of this to our main animation, we just have to drag this merge to this merge.

And as you can see, it appeared here. So I'm just gonna throw this merge back into the viewer and select this merge. And we can drag all of this forward at once up to the frontier.

As you can see it's a little bit too big, so we come to transform on the merge here and scale it down. And then we can just place it where we want it. Now another thing I'm gonna do to my farmer, I'm gonna bring these back, select the drop shadow, hit shift space, and add in a waviness node.

Now as the animation plays, he's gonna move back and forth, but obviously this is too strong. So we can turn the scale down, the strength down, and the speed down. Now we just have to animate our camera.

So I'm just gonna come to the first frame, select our camera. I'm basically gonna drag my camera back to about here. So I'm gonna come to transform and keyframe the zoom on the camera, come to the last frame, or I think I'm gonna trim this clip, so maybe frame one fifteen, zoom our camera in.

Now we can select the spline, select a box over everything and press s. I'm gonna select this one and bring it down just a little bit so that the camera starts faster. And now I'm gonna select the edit tab.

Now So we have all our pieces and the animation, we just have to make it look really cinematic. So step one is to drag an adjustment clip over top. I'm gonna select the color page.

I'm gonna increase the mid detail. I'm gonna increase the contrast quite a bit. I'm gonna increase the temperature.

I'm gonna increase the saturation. I'm gonna right click, add another node, and holding down shift, bring it into here. And I'm gonna add my favorite LUT onto this just like this and increase the temperature a little bit more.

If we look at before and after, that's before and after. But we're not done yet.

I'm gonna select effects, resolve effects. I'm gonna type in v I and drag on a vignette. I'm gonna increase the size a bit and increase the softness.

I'm going to select effects and I'm going to drag on a zoom blur. I'm going to increase the center so that the center is not blurred at all, and I'm going to decrease the zoom amount just so that we get a little bit of blur on the edges here.

I'm going to type in a grain, drag on a film grain. I'm going to increase the opacity, decrease the softness, increase the strength.

Now it looks really grainy, so we're just going to decrease the opacity. You also wanna drag down the grain size.

You basically just wanna get it so that when you zoom in, it looks like that. It's pretty cinematic. And I'm gonna drag in this dust.

This is also in the asset pack, so we can just zoom it in a little. Change the composite mode to screen and drag down the opacity. And now if we play through that, there's dust moving, which looks pretty good.

And we wanna make sure it's underneath the adjustment clip so that it gets blurred on the sides as well. Now, I also downloaded this ink splatter, so that's also in the asset pack.

And we can drag this over top just like this. And we're gonna change the composite mode to multiply, so we just have to find that right here.

And then I actually don't want it to start black, so I'm just gonna come to where I want it to start. So maybe like right here. And so now it starts like that and then as it plays, it expands like that.

So this next scene that we make is actually pretty easy. We're gonna drag another fusion composition on. We're gonna bring up our asset pack here and drag on these two elements.

Then we can create our three d environment really quick. So just a render, a merge, and a camera. Connect these two like this and throw our merge into this viewer.

Add in an image plane, connect our background to that, and then we can drag our camera back. We can select our image plane and make it really big. You can add in another image plane, drag in our farmer picture, and connect it to this merge.

Select the image plane and drag them back. Transform, size, scale them down really small. That's gonna allow us to create a lot of depth in between the two, so we can drag them back now and place them off to the side a little bit.

So now if we drag our camera all the way back and we zoom in, it creates a nice parallax effect like that. So obviously, from here, can add whatever you want. In the intro, I think I just came to here, came to our last animation, select this polygon we made, hit command copy, then we can come back to this one and hit command v and place it on the merge.

Now we can select that and bring it forward, hit transform and scale it down, and bring it to the side here. I'm gonna rotate it.

Now we can add in another image plane, add in a letter zoom in text effect, connect this and connect this, drag the text forward.

Now you can write whatever you want. Select the image plane and we can just position this where we want it. Something like that.

Another thing I did is dragged on a background and connected it to the text so that we could drag the alpha down, and it's a little bit more see through now. Can do the same. Click this background and drag the alpha down along with all of these.

And so now to animate the camera, again, you just go to the first frame, select your camera, select transform, keyframe that position, come to the end frame, and we're just going to zoom our camera in to where we want it to end. Come to the spline, select the camera, select everything and press s, and then drag this side down.

Now if we come to the edit page here, we can hold option and drag on our dust, hold option and drag on our color grade. I'm actually going to come here and remove the LUT. And then I'm also gonna come to effects and I'm gonna remove the vignette.

Now another thing I did for this one is I went to effects and I dragged on a solid color. Under settings, we can drag the position down and then holding down option, we can drag this up and place this one at the top.

Now we can come to where we want the animation of these bars to end, so like maybe about this far in and we can keyframe the position. So it's gonna end at this position. Now we can come to the first frame and drag it up.

Come to keyframes, select this, select this, and hit ease in.

And I'm gonna drag this to the back. Now we can repeat the same for the other one. So I'm gonna hit this arrow, key frame that position, come to the start frame, and drag it down.

Select key frames, select this key frame, select ease in, and drag it back. So now if you watch that back, it's gonna give you a nice cinematic look.

So as you can see, these animations are not that hard to make at all, but they look super cinematic, and not very many people put in the time to make their animations look this good. So this is how you can stand out.

And let me know down below what you guys wanna learn next.

The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

Zane Hoyer opens by stating the whole promise of the video in one breath: any random images, turned into a cinematic masterpiece, using nothing but DaVinci Resolve's Fusion tab. He proves it by building the same layered 3D parallax rig twice on two unrelated photo sets, narrating every node he drags.

Frameworks