Star Wars Stars and Warp Speed Effect

[Jeff Cochran]

Hi Phil

I’m going to give you a couple of ways to do this depending on the version of After Effects you have.

1. I hope you have Photoshop. In PSD create a canvas the size of your composition. Fill it with Black. Under filters, go to the noise filter and add a lot of noise to this layer, make it monochrome. Next, use a gaussian blur to soften slightly. Then, under image – adjustment – threshold, increase the threshold until you like what you’ve created. Then add alittle more blur to soften again. You can add more star and change the size of the stars by repeating this on a new layer, then using a transfer mode of screen for the layer. (From what I’ve read, this how the guys at ILM make star fields).

To make them twinkle, you can use adjustment layers with masks to change the brightness of the individual stars.

Warp speed, use a radial blur, set on Zoom with a key frame set to 0, then over time ramp it up to where you like it.

2. In AE 6.5 there are a couple of filters that might work for you, Try Star burst with a speed set to 0 for the stars, then you can ramp up the speed and add the Radial blur with zoom to go to warp speed. The other one is Particle System II, use this with a gravity of 0, this can be used to go to warp speed.

Hope this helps

Jeff Cochran

https://www.jeffcochrandigitalartist.com/

[Andrew Yoole]

In AE 6.5, create a black solid, apply CC Star Burst. Set keyframes from 0 to the speed you want for the hyperspace bit. (Let’s not mix up our terminology here – there’s no warp speed in the Star Wars universe!)

Precompose the solid, moving all attributes to precomp. Apply Time/Echo to the precomp layer and adjust to taste (you’ll need to reduce the Echo Time and increase the number of echoes from the defaults). You should get nice streaks of light from the stars as they move.