Assignment 9: Particle Effects

Something strange is going down on Main Street...


First of all, I need to give Videocopilot.net credit for helping me make this with their wonderful tutorials. (And of course, thank you Ben for teaching me, well, everything!) Between what I learned in class and this website, I have learned a ton more about particles and how they work than had I tried everything on my own.

Here we have some kind of energy tornado thing. It doesn't make sense, but I wanted to make something look kinda cool. I noticed videocopilot.net had a tutorial on energy and decided to try it out.

There are several particle effects in this: the tornado is a 3D layer (with a camera, of course) of twirling tripolygons with a feathered mask over it, there is a circle of tripolygons being sucked into a hole underneath that, there are "trash" particles blowing all over the place (movement of that was randomized), there are layers of "small bubbles" and "large bubbles" at the base of the tornado that utilize a puff of smoke jpeg I found, and the glowing, flickering base of the tornado is made up of two circles with the wiggler added to its opacity. That's right, I used expressions! The final layer is a black mask, which I tampered with the color correction to make the original photo of Taylor, Texas' Main Street look darker and creepier. Finally, I made all the layers into a new composition and added the camera shake (wiggler). Keep in mind, I did color correction ('curves,' to be exact) on virtually all of the layers.

I'm pretty excited about what I was able to do on my first try. My only complaint is that the bubbles didn't come out quite as I had hoped. I really wanted to make this sphere of shifting energy at the base of the tornado, kind of like on the original Terminator. Other than that, I really liked how this one came out. It's kind of creepy!

~Becca