[Michael Szalapski]

Get a picture of a rainbow. Mask it out and put it over the watering can with a low opacity.

– 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]

What do you mean when you say the rendering times are, “annoyingly slow.” What are you trying to do? How long is it taking? What sort of graphics are you trying to put on there? What kind of computer do you have?

– 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]

Two quick possibilities that are often the case when this type of question is asked.
If you aren’t doing a proper RAM preview, perhaps it’s not playing the way it should. Sometimes on a fast computer, if you press spacebar to preview, it plays faster than it would rendered out.
If you have a slower computer, sometimes the slower machine can’t play back in real time if the rendered video has too high a data rate.

What sort of preview are you seeing where everything is fine?
What are your output settings in the render queue?
What version of AE are you using?
What kind of computer do you have?

– 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]

I assume Comp A and Comp B are sitting inside another comp (Comp C), in which case, use Time Remapping on Comp A to pause it while Comp B continues to merrily play.

– 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]

These particles don’t really look like they’re attracting each other very much. Just like they’re shooting in the general direction of each other. Particular doesn’t have a way for particles to interact. They cannot attract or repel one another. However, having said that, I think you could create this using Particular. If you have Wondertouch’s ParticleIllusion it might be easier. There is an option to leave particles on the screen which has that drawn-on effect as in this video. At the bottom of this page you can see some of the beautiful art you can create with ParticleIllusion.

– 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]

Darn page, didn’t link right. I assume you mean the one they called cascade on that page I linked…the rest of my post remains unchanged.

– 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]

Are you asking how to draw the shapes?

You can draw them in Illustrator, then use masks in After Effects to reveal them over time.
Or, if you don’t want to use Illustrator, you can simply draw them in After Effects using the pen tool on a shape layer or a solid.

– 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]

I assume you mean this one. That page explains briefly how it was done. At the bottom of the first link I gave you is a link to download the entire Pyro Pack. It’s project files that are already done.

– 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]

You could probably get something similar adapting this technique.

This tutorial, which is part of a series on creating a genie lamp, is actually intended to create smoke.

Neither technique will look exactly like that picture, but you could get pretty darn close with the right shape used.

This one, using Geomancey from Digital Anarchy isn’t being intended to make something like that. However, if you look at the very end, they tweak it to something that might point you in the right direction.

Or:
I know you said you tried using the echo effect, However, you could move a stick shape (with varying width and levels of opacity) around, then use the echo effect with a lot of echoes and make sure the echoes are not spread very far apart. There are also plug-ins like CC Wide Time and others that you might want to look at. In any case using any of the Time effects like this will require you to use a lot of echoes or copies and you might want to use a vector blur, or some other blur along with 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]

Yes. Compositing is the main function for which AE was built.

As you read through your After Effects documentation to learn about all the nice things it can do, please remember that there is a forum especially for people who are beginning to learn how to use this amazing program.

– 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.