How to make a drug POV with smear or “trails” fX

[David Bogie]

Start with Motion Blur on a short clip. Try to take notes, the interactions between the subtle settings can be impossible to recreate.

Which drug, specifically. Window Pane acid tends to include vibrant color fringes to the trails while peyote sort of goes all bendy. Mescaline and mushrooms leave shorter trails with that ever-so-entertianing sparkly afterburn. Mixing or augmenting substances can personalize the experience tremendously. A bit of Boones Farm or Panama Red may dull the visual coloration while enhancing the auditory hallucinations.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Randall M]

I saw your thread earlier and read all the responses. It seems folks are pointing you toward plug in filters. Not sure because I don’t work with the ones they named.

Here is something you can try while staying within the FCP timeline and just applying simple filters like gamma correction and gaussian blur.

Practice this on a clip. Hold down your option key and click on a clip to drag it to another video track just above the original, then release the option key and let go of the clip. This should duplicate the clip. Now- throw a gaussian blur on the bottom clip, consider whacking it out a bit to see a real impact. On your top clip bring down the opacity level to 30 or 40 percent. Now drag that top clip about 10 to 20 frames out of sync with the bottom clip. You could drop a gamma correction filter on one of the clips to kind of blow it out a light.

I’ve used this on a music video and then worked with keyframes on those individual clips to lessen or intensify the effect at different points in time. In my view this creates a kind of dreamy state, especially if you want to start playing with the speed of the clips (control click on the clip and chose “speed” in the subtext menu).

Then there are several stock filters you could apply- fisheye comes to mind, that might enhance the above technique.

I think I physically experienced this effect sometime in the 80s. (laughs)

Hope this is helpful.
Randall

[David Roth weiss]

[Randall M] “I think I physically experienced this effect sometime in the 80s.”

When precisely were the 80s? My memory of that period is hazy for some reason.

[Russell Lasson]

You can also use the Channel Offset filter to separate different colors. Then if you add the Channel Blur filter, you can selectively blur the separate channels. Just play around until you get something you like.

-Russ

[Jason Porthouse]

I’ve often used a whole stack of the same shot offset by 2-3 frames to get a dreamy trail – you can try putting blurs, glows etc on some to enhance the effect – it’s mice when motion stops and everything catches up to resolve in to a coherent image before going all bluurrry again.

Ahhh takes me back….

‘It’s called a Camberwell Carrot because it comes from Camberwell and looks like a carrot…’

JP

[Jason Porthouse]

Actually I meant to say ‘it’s nice’ rather than ‘it’s mice’ but with some drugs the latter is probably more apt.

JP

[Seawild]

Mice?!

Heck, it’s those darn flying Bats that I’m really worried about!!

[Bob Auiler]

CHV has a filter called “ON DRUGS”, in their time collection plugins that might give you the look you want. I of course cannot verify if the effect is accurate.

https://www.chv-plugins.com/colltime.html