[Jakob Fletcher]

Alright, no one has responded, but for those who are interested, here’s an update on the situation. So far I’ve come up with the perfect warp (without the actor going through), and I achieved this beautiful effect by using CC Glass.

I created a solid layer for the warp, did some masking & keyframing, then added some fractal noise and precomposed the layer, then made the layer invisible in the main composition. After that I added the CC Glass effect onto the background plate and used the precomposed layer as a bump map. With a little tweaking it turned out into a fantastic warp/ripple just like in the movie. There are also many possibilities of fine-tuning this effect, among other things by using the Liquify tool.

Now I’m working with the actor going through the warp. It needs a bit more work, but right now I’m getting the best results by using footage of the actor walking (+ fractal noise) as a displacement map applied on the background plate, and then adding the rest of the footage after the displacement, keyframing the mask to create a transition so that the person “breaks through” the ripple. In any case, this requires some rotoscoping in order to separate the person from the ripple behind him.

So yeah, it’s looking pretty good, but at the same time I’d also love to hear some advice from people who are more experienced than I am. I’m not sure if I could also make use of the Reshape effect to get the actor to come out of the warp.

Regards,
Jakob