Create an Aurora in After Effects, No Plugins Required

Recreate a ribbon of energy just like the Aurora Borealis or Aurora Australis.

Auroras are one of the most beautiful and captivating phenomena in the night sky.  In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to recreate the Northern Lights (or Southern Lights) using a Shape layer, some very simple expressions and a 4-Color Gradient effect.

We’ll use the path tool to draw the approximate shape, which means that you can draw an aurora in any shape or even text.  And then we’ll use the shape layer’s stoke properties of taper and wave to create a more organic shape.  Next using the Paths from Nulls included script, we link our path points to nulls and then wiggle each one.  The repeater option on the shape layer gives us the ribbon look and finally, we’ll add color using a 4-Color Gradient.

Project download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/x6qzakqoayltyap/Aurora.zip?dl=1

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