VFX Testing: Background Particles and Camera Shake

After I had changed my idea, I thought about new ways in which I could add elements into my project, one being camera shakes for when the T-Rex is stomping on the ground and the second being particles floating around in the background in my film so that the jungle looked more alive. For this to work I first wanted to do some tests to ensure that I could add them in smoothly into my film.

The first test that I did was the camera shake. For this I followed a YouTube tutorial that I found that was how to fly like the man of steel. Although a video about flying there was a section at the end that looked at how to create a camera shake which looked very simple to add into a film. To do this test I took a piece of raw footage from my film, one that hadn't been edited at all and applied the technique to it.

I was very happy with the results although the shake lasted a bit too long, and I am confident that I can use this in my final film to get the right technique of the T-Rex getting closer.

I then moved onto looking at the background particles as this was a little bit more difficult, but again I found a video on YouTube that I could follow to see whether it was any good or not.I started the test of by creating a random coloured solid for the background in my new composition. I then a colour ramp onto it which would be the background colour and made it a radial ramp so that the colour started in the middle.

Now it was time to add the particles so I took another solid and this time made it a light blue which would be the colour of the particles and added the CC Particle World effect onto it. At first the particles looked more like a volcano so a lot had to be changed in order for it to look good.

To create the look of floating particles which I want a lot of things had to be changed about the particles like getting rid of the velocity and gravity in the composition and then changing the animation to explosive and also changing the particle type to a lens convex so that it changed to balls within the area.

Now that the particles where starting to look more like how I wanted then I played around with a few more settings so that they were much smaller by changing the birth and death rate. I made a few more adjustments to the settings and then made the life of them longer so that they didn't blink in and out too much.

Overall I am very happy with the result of it. The particles move upwards ever so slightly which adds another sense of realism and also I can definitely see them in my final film in the jungle scene.