5) Smoky McSmokerson

Here are two videos I made using smoky text thanks to this tutorial. It's a really cool effect, but too bad there wasn't enough smoke in the one above to show all of the text. I should've moved the text over or zoomed in on the smoke itself. Oh, and by the way, the text is the name of our production group, Mascot Wedding. Feel free to check out all of our short films.



This one is better and it isn't. Sure, the text is visible, but the effect is more hazy because I zoomed in on the smoke video. Plus, I think I went overboard with the Fast Blur effect.

But that's one of the challenging things about doing these short animations: finding usable stock footage. Youtube works ok sometimes, but the quality is shit. Plus I have to convert everything from .flv to .avi files so I can import them into AE. I'll keep digging.

At any rate, I'm still not quite sure of how to go about doing all these effects without following the tutorial step-by-step. It uses a lot of effects that I'm still getting used to (displacement maps, alpha channels, etc.).

But then again, I've only been using AE for less than a week.