Explosions

After hours and hours of just playing around in After Effects I thought of a great way to make my opening scene a bit more dramatic. As I mentioned in the blog post previous to this one, the stock footage came in really handy when wanting to create some nice simple vfx shots. Below is a shot of the actors jumping over the wall away from the space ship. The spaceship is shooting at everyone so I have added some explosions in as they are running away. The only slight problem I had was the footage was just a single layer which meant a tiny bit of masking had to be done to make it look like the explosions were behind the wall. I had to get the timing right as all dust from the explosions would look as if they are in front of the actors which would have meant I would have needed to do more masking.

I added some artillery bullets hitting the ground to make the explosions look a bit more real instead of them coming from no where. I did this by just grabbing an image from google and animating it coming from above where my spaceship would be to the bottom of where I want the explosions to be in only a few frames. I think a bit of camera shake would help this shot as the bullets hit the ground.