Special Effect (fog to ghost)

[julient44446696]

I want to make fog that then contracts into a ghost. How can I do that?

[Rick Gerard]

The most efficient workflow depends on what kind of footage and other assets you have. Generally, it is a lot easier to start with the image of the ghost then turn that into the fog, then pre-compose and time remap the comp so that the fog turns into the first frame of the ghost animation.

Tell us what kind of images you are working with, give us an idea of your experience level with AE, and let us know if you have any 3rd party plugins like Particular or Form. We can be a lot more help if we have some details.

[julient44446696]

I got an order to produce an advertising video. I have a dark atmosphere and have to insert animated fog there first and then it has to contract into a ghost. I have never worked with After Effects before

[Rick Gerard]

How are you planning on creating the ghost? Blender may be a better option if you are starting from scratch. 

[julient44446696]

Like a human.

I don't know how to do it. Please help me.

[Rick Gerard]

Options using just After Effects:

First:

1. Draw a human shape you can animate using puppet pin or character animator
2. Photograph a person against a green screen so you can remove the background

Second:

Animate the shape - apply various filters to make the shape look more ghostly, distortion effects will help

Add distortion effects and color correction to the footage of the actor

Options using just blender:

1. Create a human shape or import a human OBJ file from one of the free resources
2. Use the animator tools available in Blender to animate your human shape
3. Add textures to make the human shape look more like a ghost
4. Apply distortions to the human shape to make the ghost more etherial

That will get you started. Estimated time for somebody that has never used After Effects or any kind of drawing software to learn the techniques and be successful at creating something original instead of just copying an existing tutorial is about 200 hours. Using Blender (http://blender.org) will take about the same amount of time.

If you have a link to a specific video you want to try and recreate it would help. A project like this might require a team of professionals and take several months to complete a 2-minute sequence. On the other hand, I could shoot someone on a green screen, key them out, and apply a bunch of distortion filters and some particle effects and end up with a ghost in with about a half-hour behind the camera and an hour in post. There would be a tremendous difference in how believable these two shots were and what they looked like.

[julient44446696]

In the past i maked a  Music video and Cinematic video. Before I buyed an Adobe sub I used shotcut, but there are no special effects. I know how long it takes to make a video. The Music video took about 300 hours to edit and cut.

[Rick Gerard]

Show me a sample and I'll try and point you in the right direction. Here's a shape layer with a bunch of effects above a shot that creates the illusion of a ghostly figure running across the highway. You are seeing everything that I did to both layers:

The add blend mode helps a lot. Nothing but an animated path to animate the running figure, a mask to help with compositing options, fractal noise to create a cloud texture, Turbulent displace to make the whole thing wiggle a bit and some directional blur. It took about 3 or 4 minutes, but it is pretty simple and I would not deliver something like this to a client.