Smudge Tool and spot color effect in AE

Question

Hi! For a personal project I've been trying to create something in AE using the text animation seen in the Malcolm in the Middle titles.

https://youtu.be/KEHq10rJAqc?feature=shared

https://vimeo.com/167402599

I noticed during freeze-framing different shot it seems like most of the distortion effects were created using something similar to the Smudge tool in PS (with a reddish color effect added on the "smudged" parts). My question is since nothing like this exists in AE (and this was done 20+ years ago.), how can you achieve both the smudging and affected coloring effects 1:1? Thanks in advance.

https://ibb.co/album/YFQZ2b

(Album with the freeze frames in question.)

Mylenium · Answer

There are no smudges. All i see is ton's of directional blurs and a displacment map whose direction is fluctuating around. that's stuff you could do 20 years ago. And thnat's basically your answer. You need to get into the dark craft of learning how to create displacment maps and on top of it addional mattes to control where thsoe distortions and blurs appear. Of course then it's all refined with additiona Gaussian blur and potentially a video feedback effect that's then colorized using Colorama or Tritone effects. Again, all of this is doable in AE and would have been 20 years ago.

Mylenium

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded