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Filmstrip tutorial - Page 2 - Creating Animated 3d Displacement Maps
By Chris Bobotis

Note
In this compostion we will create a series of overlapping Effects on Solids to add nuance to the filmstrips movements. 6 Solids + corresponding Effects, movements and alterations in Opacity will be done in all.- The following steps are optional. In this exercise we will add nuance to the animation via FreeForm's 3d Displacement mapping.

If you wish to skip this secction simply click on page 3 below:

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Step 8
Open up the ''3_3d Displace Comp'' and create a new Solid - name this Solid ''Fractal''. The purpose for this layer/effect is to add subtle movement and fluctuations to the edges of the filmstrip... read on. To this layer add the After Effects ''Fractal Noise'' Filter. Effects > Render > Fractal Noise. Or load the ''fractal_noise_filmstrip.ffx'' favorite that you will find in the file available for download. Should you decide to tackle this on your own, the settings for the ''Fractal Noise'' filter are as such:

Your Composition should now look something like this:

Step 9
We wanted restrict this fluctuation to the right hand side of the animation. To do this, we will now create a new solid to the comp size and add the After Effects ''Ramp'' filter. Effects > Render > Ramp. Make sure that the darkest part of the ramp is to the left and the lightest to the right. Once you have your Ramp layer set up, switch this layer's transfer mode from ''Normal'' to ''Multiply''. The resulting combination of the 2 layers should be as follows:

Step 10
We now wanted to further restrict the fluctations to the top most and bottome most parts of the filmstrip so we simply added a new solid, masked it, added a 36 pixel blur to the mask and brought down the opacity to 80.

Step 11
To add a rippling effect in the movement, as if the filmstrip lost tension for a fraction of the time. We simply created a smaller solid, masked this, blurred the mask, changed the position of this layer over time and set the opacity to 40%.

We then duplicated this layer 2 times and varied it's position slightly on each new layer.

Once the layers were set-up we then animated certain properties per layer as such:

At frame 00:00

At frame 01:00

At frame 03:00

At frame 05:00

Now create a RAM preview to see what it is exactly that we have had you doing for the past 20 minutes or so ;) If you wish, you can render this comp out and then import same for use in the next phase - this will save on some render time.

Believe or not the tough part is over. Click on the link below to move on to the last portion of this tutorial.

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