[Max Haller]

You can try playing with animated noise overlays, or setting the blend modes to the line layers as dancing dissolve. Blurring the edges can help make more noise show up too.

[Max Haller]

Does the video have any keying effects that are applied in premiere to key out the greenscreen? Those would need to be rendered out before the alpha channel would be “baked” into the footage. Just wanted to rule that out before you go crazy trying to figure it out. If that is the case just rekey in after effects or make sure the footage was rendered with an alpha channel.

[Max Haller]

I’m not sure how well AE handles 3d depth of obj’s without 3rd party plugins. Have you tried to render the cube out with an object buffer pass? That should give you a matte to obscure the solid when it should be behind the cube.

[Max Haller]

At first glance I feel like its a mixture of luma matting and it kind of looks like a mosaic with CC kernel applied to make that grid. I’m not really sure how to get the boxes smaller in the lighter areas, but maybe that’ll help you get started. CC kernel seems kind of arcane imo but if you play with the sliders you should be able to get a similar effect to find edges in PS.

Maybe that combined with another duped footage layer that you could color correct to get the shadows how you want them for the matte.

[Max Haller]

Ahhh I see! I tried recreating what you described and did get the same distortion. Try this- I put the shape layer into its own precomp that’s only large enough to fit the shape.

Make sure the shape layer is still 3d and do the rotation inside that tiny comp. This way you can still have the long, skinny comps in your main comp to drag around. So it’ll be “Shape layer Comp” > the “70×1080 Comp” > Main comp. That seemed to stop the distortion while still letting me work with the skinny comps. hope it helps

[Max Haller]

Hey Steve

Have you tried duplicating the layer and painting out the bells. Then on the layer that still has the bells, mask them off and move the anchor point to the joint they should swing from.

If you only need to make it work from this angle I think you can get a passable result.

Turn on the motion blur, make the masked out bell a 3D layer and animate the X rotation. You can animate the hammer swinging inside in a similar fashion (dupe, paint it on on the bell, and animate).

If you play with the easing in the graph editor you can probably get a realistic movement. I had some success with the really quick attempt i tried. It won’t really hold water if there’s a lot of camera movement or anything that reveals it’s not truly 3D.

[Max Haller]

I could be wrong but I think that might be some sort of datamoshing effect. There should some plugins/tutorials out there to explain better. Sort of looks like the photo on the homepage of https://datamoshing.com/ You could probably get pretty close with richard’s idea too. Maybe a couple blocky fractal noises with different scales and luma matte to taste.

[Max Haller]

Hey Dan

You’ve probably checked this already but it looks like they could be rotated in 3D? I noticed they were 3d layers in the precomp and the 3D box isnt ticked in the main comp. Not totally sure if that’ll make a difference though since you have that continous box checked. I’d turn on the 3D in the main comp and see if that changs anything.

On a side note the CC snow effect might be useful if you’re trying to make snow falling.

[Max Haller]

Hey Nick, I think using particles for the liquid could work too. I don’t have a tutorial handy to link but I know you can get a blobby/liquid sort of effect by throwing a Simple Choker effect on an adjustment layer over the particles. If you crank that up you should start to see the shapes merge together. Adding a blur to particles first might help too.

[Max Haller]

Actually I’m running CC 2018 here but I still have the animation codec. Not sure if this really viable since it’ll be a huge file, but would lossless with alpha work for what you need?