trying to create candle flicker

[Mike Clasby]

Wiggle something with the wiggle expression. Three possible ways follow.

1) Here’s one way, pretty straight forward.

Have your pumpkin front or face layer, then below it the inside of the pumpkin, an orange solid as bright and light as you want the candle color to be at it’s brightest.

Set the opacity of that “inside the pumpkin” layer to about 90, then add this wiggle expression to opacity (Copy the Expression, Alt-Click the opacity Stopwatch, Paste, click outside the box):

wiggle (5, 20)

The 5 is the frequency (how often it wiggles) and the 20 is the Amplitude (how much it wiggles), change to taste.

With a black background the light orange solid flickers brighter and darker and the color appears to change with the flicker.

2) You can also try adding Glow to either the front of inside layer and wiggle it or Pickwhip to that original wiggle expression. Glow is always problematical for me, I have hard time controlling it, but would be very nice on a flickering pumpkin.

3) If you really want to change the color with a wiggle expression, add the Effect Fill, set the Color stopwatch to a nice orange/gold/yellow, then add a wiggle expression to Color (Alt-click the color stopwatch.:

wiggle(5, 0.1)

You’ll notice what a small amount the Amplitude is, 0.1, that’s because all the colors for that stopwatch are from 0 to 1, so you only want the wiggle amplitude (amount) to be a small fraction of that, it will wiggle around, above and below that initial color you set. So you might need to tweak that original color you set.

So if you set that 0.1 to 1 you’ll wiggle thru all the colors, not very pumpkin-like.

[Darby Edelen]

I would offer up 2 other possible solutions:

1) A front jack-o-lantern layer with the face cut out, behind that a light yellow layer set to the ‘add’ blending mode and behind that a back of the pumpkin layer. Set the opacity of the additive layer to something like 60% and then wiggle it quickly, something like wiggle(3, 10) on the opacity property.

2) Do the same as above with 3D layers and put a light in the center of the ‘front’ and ‘back’ layers, wiggle its intensity.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Sean Kimber]

Thank you both for your suggestions. I really appreciate it and will give them a try!