In the previous post in this series we covered how we managed to make our mad scientists lab appear to go into red alert after Bob the hapless technician pressed the Big Red Button to start an antimatter reaction. The climax to the red alert is the earth exploding, but we needed a transition from the lab to the explosion.
Boom!
Having watched far too many sci-fi and horror films over the course of our lives, we decided to simulate the start of the antimatter reaction by having the scene go fuzzy like a television with bad reception and then fade out, like an old school cathode ray tube television being shut off.
First off, we created a freeze frame and exported it as a black and white image.
Freeze!
We then created a composition consisting of two White Solid Layers.
I see white, and a little more white…
We took the layer called “White Solid 1” and applied an effect called Fractal Noise:
Making lines
This created a series of Horizontal lines rippling vertically on the screen.
It’s all getting wavy.
We took “White Solid 2” and applied a variation of the same Fractal Noise effect:
Fuzzy Settings
Who called the fuzz?
We then applied the fuzzy static over the horizontal lines using an Overlay to create:
Warm and fuzzy.
We created a new composition called Freeze Frame with the static image as the first layer and the Grainy Effect composition applied as an overlay.
Almost there…
This created the final effect:
Maybe we shouldn’t have done that
Next, we animated scaling the picture down to a tiny dot and then fading out, just like an old television being turned off. If you zoom into the little dot, you’ll actually see a very small version of the above image.