Fake clothing spinning inside a washing machine (an image)

[Daniel Waldron]

Can you shoot, or even more easily, just buy stock footage of clothes spinning in a machine, and then composite that on your photo?

[Sebastian Lee]

Bah! Why are you guys like belittle the power of After Effects? It’s a great tool and almost every fx are unequivocally not impossible to be done. All I wanted to know is achieving the fx entirely on AE and not purchasing pricey stock footage, mind you, I don’t own a credit/debit card and I’m not from the States. I’m really mindful of originality and work practically, not too fast jumping into the beeline to solve my problem. If you don’t mind, can you tell me again what fx needed?

@Dave LaRonde – Doesn’t matter.

[Daniel Waldron]

Hi Sebastian, we don’t always know your intentions, so please don’t be insulted when you get offered a perfectly reasonable solution.

You should first use the ellipse tool to mask your clothing layer to fit into your washing machine. Then set the anchor point in the middle of your circle. Set it to rotate very fast for however long you need the animation to run. Turn on motion blur. Experiment with different blurs and distort effects to give it a more streaky look that you would get from fast spinning clothes.

For the glass, it could be as simple as creating a white circular shape layer that’s about the same size as your clothing layer. Lower the opacity a lot so you can see through it. Maybe 15%? Add a slight reflection of the room environment into the glass by masking a photo of a room to the size of the glass and again lowering the opacity quite a bit. Precompose these two layers and add a mesh warp to make the glass bow out a little like it does on a real washing machine.

This is not a perfect solution by any means and someone else will probably have some better ideas, but it’s a starting point.