Sunset, Heat deformation for a Movie Title.

[Ian Northrop]

I’d recommend for a quick, relatively easy approach to find some good stock footage of water, shot overhead (artbeats.com). Performa speed-ramp on some stock footage where the water has some tight ‘chop’/ripples in it, speeding it up a bit – this should help to emulate heat distortion. Experiment with blur on your stock footage and, I’m not entirely sure about this part, you may need to desaturate your footage, maybe not though. Now you can use this treated footage as the basis for your distortion on your text layer. Apply a ‘displacement map’ effect to your text layer for distortion. In the effects setting, point the displacement layer parameter to your treated water layer (as basis for distortion), then set both horizontal and vertical distortion parameters to ‘luminance’ (this is where desaturating your water layer comes in to play, you can perform ‘levels’ adjustments to your treated, desaturated footage to tweak the final distortion outcome). One more thing – turn eyeball icon ‘off’ for your water layer when you’re ready to view the result of it on your text element.

Hope this long-winded explanation helps. Your other option is to find a 3d effects artist to render you out a displacement map (usually red and green) from a 3d program which you, as well, would use in conjunction with the ‘displacement map’ effect in After Effects. Good luck.
-i4n

[Michele Poggi]

I’m quite proud to see that your suggestion isn’t far away from what I actually thought to do. I think my obstacle here is english for the most. About “speed-ramp” you simply mean to look among those artbeats, right? So.. Pre-composing some footage that can actually become a “matte” for a displacement map is a good idea, and I’m underlining all of this because I’d love you to correct me if I misunderstood something:

Displacement map actually need a pre-composed layer and uses the contrast between a matte, so black with white, to deform the layer. Changing the horizontal/vertical depth of the distortion can really recreate the heat effect, and here we are. I could actually ask to a friend of mine who has Psunami to render something for me. 🙂

Something NEW I learned (this community is probably one of the most rare diamonds in the Web, I just hope to be able to be of help as much as you all) is this Luminance idea.. The (Correct) language you used confused me a little (damn first language not being english), but I’ll try it out.

“Freelance Post-Producer”

Editor Video
Graphic Designer
Digital Compositor
VFX Supervisor

Mail: snm.poggi@gmail.com