After Effects to the rescue

With no time for long renders and fancy effects, I turned to Adobe After Effects to put together as much of this thing as I could in 2D.

Green Screen

The first place I applied After Effects (AE) was in adding some animated magma effects to some of my shots. I used a 'green screen' approach, coloring the 'magma' portions of the texture pure, blank green, then rendering out the sequence. The photo above shows a frame from a sequence where a 'plate' slides under North America, pushing up mountains.

I rendered the sequence and pulled the results into AE. In AE, I created an animated 2D texture to represent the magma - using fractal noise, Foam, and vector blur, if you want to know - then composited it into the sequence, keying out the green and replacing it with my magma. This was much quicker to render since my magma was only 2D rather than 3D.

Smash Zoom

One of the new shots added recently was the massive explosion of the Yellowstone caldera. This is a big, important shot, and it has to show a lot in just four seconds. Moreover, it's an explosion. I love blowing stuff up.

I decided to render a single, high resolution shot of the landscape seen from above. I added some subtle clouds in AE, to help hide defects in the texture, which I had no time to fine-tune.

I played around for a while with particle effects and whatnot in AE, but I couldn't come up with a convincing explosion that I liked. What I needed were some nice, real world shots of smoke and explosion. Unfortunately, I didn't have any. Searching desperately I found a single, low resolution MOV animation of a 'cloud chamber' - basically white liquid being pored into clear liquid, giving the appearance of a roiling white smoke cloud appearing. It was cool, but not exactly what I needed.

For starters, it's from the side, and my shot is from high above the earth - wrong perspective. It's also very small - 320x200 or so - and my final animation is for HDTV. But it's the only real-world video I've got on hand, so I work with it.

I pulled the video into AE. It occured to me that an exploding volcano shoots stuff out in every direction from the center. So I made about 9-10 copies of my video clip and arranged them like spokes on a wheel, but overlapping. This created something that looked a bit like a flower, or a cauliflower. I created a mask to hide the edges and add some asymmetry to my 'flower.' I also offset the various elements in time, so that they didn't look as symmetrical when played back.

Next I added an animated 'bulge' using AE's Spherize filter.

I used AE's Bend filter, animated, to bend the smoke plume as time progressed (hopefully) making it appear that the wind was blowing the smoke in one direction as the explosion progressed.

I added in some of the AE particle effects for smoke and fire I had experimented with earlier, to create the initial explosion and add some interest to the cloud.

I added a simple shadow effect under the cloud, and gradually pulled color from the scene as the cloud grows, to give a sense of ... I dunno, but it seemed appropriate.

Finally, because I've been watching too much Battlestar Gallactica, I added camera shake and an unnecessary smash zoom to really liven things up.

The final results, from start to finish, took me only about four hours, but it's probably my favorite sequence in the animation.

You can see a small version of it here.