[Michael Szalapski]

Particular. You could make the emitter be controlled by a light. Make the size of the emitter very small, but the spotlight’s spread wide enough to hit the space you want.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Assuming you have the Pyro Pack from Trapcode’s Particular page as mentioned previously, you would use the cascade one and put your image behind it (lowest in the layer stacking order.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Real quick (it’s late and I’m tried so this might not be the best idea ever).
You could always put it over green (or red or blue or whatever color’s not in your design) and key it out.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

It has to be lit right to be seen well. A nice strong backlight tends to work well.
You could try making your own using some sort of gelatin/thickening substance. If nothing else, you’ll have fun playing with slime.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Mr. Mercury could potentially be tweaked to look like slime/slobber. But I don’t know that you could get that sticky quality that dog saliva has. Why not just get a St. Bernard out in the summer and run for a few steps? It doesn’t take much to get buckets of the stuff.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Most of that video is relatively basic. Animation of masks, overlaying of textures, color correction and animation of layers and cameras in AE’s 2.5d.

All stuff you can learn about from Adobe’s own documentation. Before tutorials make much sense you should learn the basics of the program. If you’d rather be walked through it by a great teacher Total Training is great at teaching the fundamental things about the application.

If you want a more specific walk-through, please specify what part of the video you were interested in emulating. Is it the coloring, the 3d look, the shapes, the textures, the text? All very different tutorials.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

This thread talks about it. Basically you precomp your layer then in that new composition choose Composition>Pre-Render

Adobe’s help documents also talk about it.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Try prerendering your trapcode particular layers.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

To quote The IT Crowd, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Also, since you’re talking about crashes I’ll assume it’s a Windows machine, if you hold Alt + Ctrl + Shift while AE’s starting up you can trash the preferences file. It’ll rebuild a default one…that fixes a lot of issues. (It also means you’ll have to redo any changes you’ve made as far as preferences go…)

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Precompose your text with its distortion. Then you can swivel the precomp to your heart’s content.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.