Greg Markman
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ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST TITLE CONCEPT

THE ELECTRIC KOOL AID ACID TEST

 

Process

For years I’ve had an obsession with seeing how far I can push After Effects in recreating handdrawn or handpainted textures and animation. With only about a week and a half to complete this piece from concept to final product I pulled from all the experimentation I’ve done.

I’ve moved on a bit from this process now, but I still get a lot of motion designeers, particularly people with illustration backgrounds, asking for process so I’ve detailed it below:

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Step 1
Step 1

First, in photoshop I created a large striped image in grayscale using an oil brush, makings sure there was a lot of blending.

Step 2
Step 2

In AE I animated some fractal noise

Step 3
Step 3

I used Tint to color the grayscale image and using a displacment map, moving the image over the Fractal Noise makes it look gooey and flowing.

Step 4
Step 4

I animated this sort of blooming shape and used it as a matte for the paint composition. I also added some colored roughen edges rust to make it look grittier and ad some imperfection.

Step 5
Step 5

After arranging the blooming shape and some other elements into a loop, I luma matted it using this Tissue Paper texture that I’ve had for a long time. You could probably create something similar using fractal noise, but the important part is that it has a lot of variation in luminance so it will create litte splotches of light and dark and help create imperfections and a sort of brush texture over everything.

Step 6
Step 6

Placing that entire stack back over a solid color finishses the effect, adding the splotches of light and dark. I also added some grain over everything, just to add a little more grit.

Step 7
Step 7

Again, I could have also simply drawn or traced figures with photoshop brushes, but with so little time to complete this project I was not going to do that.

I used just some really bad (but free!) stock green screen footage of 3D characters walking. The keying I did was not good, but it’s actually IMPORTANT THAT THE KEY IS NOT PERFECT (explained in Step 9).

Step 8
Step 8

I added a fill so I can use these characters as a luma matte. Some Roughen edges was also added, which may be made redundent in the next step, but I do think it might add some more imperfection to the edges of the matte. I then arranged some character layers in 3d space.

Step 9
Step 9

Adding a glass effect, because the matte is so imperfect creates these flairs and frays to the outer edges of the characters which simulates a sort of paint brush effect.

Step 10
Step 10

Creating a luma matte with the tissue paper texture will create the patches of light and dark and imperfections when I use these characters as a luma mate for my colored paint layers.