Category: Techniques

I don’t normally re-do my video projects, usually because I’m lazy and often times because my first pass is about as far as my resources can take me. Since I subscribed to ProductionCrate.com and now have access to not only more video…

Explosions are impractical effects for small movie makers and hobbyists like me who need to learn critical VFX skills. I can’t just go someplace a “blow something up” because just writing that on my blog is going to get me on a…

I’m still plugging away at a use for Trapcode Particular, and seeing as how we’re sliding into winter weather like a front-wheel drive sedan with bald tires, I figured that making snow wasn’t just for ski resorts. This is the motif I’d…

If there is one boat I miss not having sailed upon, it’s the Adobe (né, Macromedia) Flash period of the web. During its peak adoption, I was working for a small web development company and was personally responsible for a lot of…

When the weather is nice during the work week I will head outside for a quick walk around our business park. It’s a pretty standard neighborhood, although we also house the town’s police and fire departments so sometimes it can get loud…

Here’s my first project featuring Trapcode Particular. I think it came out OK overall. We have a gaming group called Combat Wombat, and our “streaming group” — when some of us were live-streaming — was called “The Wombattery”. We had a logo…

Here’s a quick test. I’ve traditionally used the chroma key when live streaming, putting the screen behind myself so I could punch out whatever messy basement might be in frame. I’ve never really used the green screen the way that Hollywood does,…

Continuing my love of tracking, I had watched a tutorial video that covered a lot of effects, including one where an actor, portraying an “android”, had an embedded battery meter at the base of his neck. I thought it would be a…

Even though I got into After Effects to make widgets for live streaming, that idea has fallen by the wayside in favor of learning how to do visual effects with real video. One effect that seems to be overwhelmingly common in video…

Now, Sometimes these things that I make I make because I had a really, really quick idea brought on by something I saw out in the wild. This is one of them. I was stuck behind an 18-wheeler in a construction zone,…