Man of Steel - first flight - dround particles trembling efect recreation.

It all starts with planning so you can at least do the following in a reasonable amount of time:

When you have at least 3 layers 

• Rotoscoped or keyed actor
• Particle Simulations
• Background

You start adding things that help you create the illusion of reality like Light Wrap, Depth of Field, Color correction, and you transfer the vibration you want in the ground to all of the plates (layers, or nested(pre) comps) using expressions and parenting. Depending on the actual footage you have the final comp could be anywhere from 4 or 5 layers to 50. 

You can do everything but making the particle systems conform to uneven geometry in the background using the standard tools the come with AE. The 3D model that matches the ground could be created in C4D Lite and the camera shake could be added to the scene. You could get pretty close to particles following the geometry of the ground using CC Particle world but you would need a lot of layers with different particles sizes and shapes and a bunch of track mattes to hide particles when they go behind the geometry in the scene for the final composite to work properly. You could get even closer using Element 3D and Trapcode Particular if you have those 3rd party effects. 

What is your experience level with After Effects? If you have Element 3D you should go over to the Red Giant site to learn how to use that tool. The same thing goes for Particular. You need to be very familiar with AE's 3D world, rotoscoping, Rotobrush, and/or keying or creating procedural mattes to separate the actor from the background. If there is camera movement in the shot it needs to be planned so that the camera tracker has some geometry to work with. This is not the kind of composite that can be created by just going out in the woods with your camera or your phone and shooting something you hope will work. If you carefully plan the shot understanding what can cause problems you could go out in the woods and shoot a shot where your actor put his hand to the ground and everything trembled. It just takes planning.