Creative Compositing - Week 5 - Particles in After Effects

In this lesson we were to present our research and tests to Isaiah as he came round to us. Before that we looked at how we could use particles to make stock footage fire look more realistic against a background.

To start we were given the fire footage which we key lighted and masked around it so we could feather out the edges, so it blended with the background.


We then created a solid layer on top of it and added the particle playground (effects - simulation - particle playground). The particle started off falling downwards so we had to change the gravity of them so they would float upwards. We also changed the radius so they were spread out more. We next duplicated the layer and changed the colour of it and off-set it so it gave a better effect to the fire.

Fire Particles Test:

https://vimeo.com/157740619



Helpful Videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EO54MDIcBU - this video showed a different way of using the particles which looks very effective


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLgoCEHN-64 - this was also cool at showing how to make particle follow something