Special effects with After Effects

Bismillah ar-Rahmaan ar-Raheem,

Editing software alone will only take you so far. Anyone serious about adding special effects to their film needs a program like After Effects, Shake (Mac), etc. Hollywood keeps raising the bar and what is considered "state of the art" today may be referred to as "chessy" tomorrow. The good news is that the gap between what the industry can do and what we can do at home has become much smaller. With the average price of PCs and Macs dropping, its now even more affordable to buy a computer which will let you add those cool special effects to your movies.

Do you remember the morphing effect in "Terminator 2" or the one in Michael Jackson's "Black & White" video? You can do it After Effects! (how cool will it be to introduce your characters in your film by using this technique)



Click on the picture above to see a cool morphing effect done with the After Effects software. Here is the tutorial.

After Effects is a very powerful special effects program, some say the most powerful program for film effects... period. What Photoshop has done for still pictures, After Effects has done for video. Check out this demo for effects (the last one with weather effect is awesome). To give you a taste of what After Effects can do, make sure to check this tutorial out too.

The What is Broken film was made with a $8000 budget. The web docs demonstrates just some of the stuff they did with After Effects but the treasure of the website is the Forum section. They answer questions on everything from the planning stage to the post production phase. A must read for those who planning to make thier first independent film.