How can I make letters burning in a random way on a piece of wood?

[Aharon Rabinowitz]

check out this tutorial and see if it doesn’t get you started:

Part 1
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/horror_text1.php

Part 2
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/horror_text2.php

Obviously you’d use a different color… but basically it’s how I’d do it.

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Aharon Rabinowitz
arabinowitz(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com

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[David Del]

Thanks so much! I am almost there – but how would I go about making it glow like an ember from within the text outward? Maybe like the face of Surious Black in Harry Potter when his face is in the fire? I want the letters to burn and smoulder…as they come through. Any ideas?

[Tim Kolb]

Aharon’s tutorial is excellent for making the text appear…the burning and smoking would still be necessary to sell the shot however…

The way to do it with the smallest AE burden in my opinion, would to set up a piece of wood to shoot blank, and then literally “burn in” the text with a hot brand without moving the wood. The blank wood and the smoking burn area would be the first and last steps, and the more you can make real, the better in my experience.

In between you’d need some sort of easily keyable flames (I think that several of these stock footage collections have this) and some smoke, which is actually easier than ever with AE (look for tutorials on “particle effects”…I find particle-produced flames to be less convincing than smoke).

The flames would have to move and keyframe to the locations that are becoming blackened through some method similar to Aharon’s tutorial. If time and budget are factors (and when are they not?), I’d consider beefing up the smoke density in the foreground in places to help the process be less “under the microscope” during the transition.

TimK,
Director,
Kolb Productions,

Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
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