Are you awesome? Do you love sound FX and music? Do you know who Michael Giacchino is?

Video Copilot is looking for talented sound and music designers with at least 1-2-years experience. We are looking for individuals that have a keen EAR for abstract sound design with an up-beat and cinematic musical sense. Individuals should be motivated, exploratory, well-organized and have a good sense of humor.

If you think you have what it takes, please send us a link or a 1-2 min MP3 of your best stuff. Please keep email attachments under 5 MBs to be considered. Be sure to mention what type of setup you are using and a good recording microphone is a bonus but not required.

Please Email job inquiries to:

Jobs (at) videocopilot.net

In a recent post, I rendered a fluid particle system and faked the shadow by duplicating the render and adding a blur. But, then I started thinking... what about a particle system that is more defined, like dropping balls? The blur-method would not work. So then I had more questions...

How could you create a dynamic shadow, that lines up correctly with your particles AND appears only when the particle is close to the surface? What about making the shadow look like Global Illumination? What if you went back in time and ran into yourself from the PAST!?

Eventually I though of a solution and it seems to work pretty well. Specifically if you think of a code word that only you know, it would be easy to prove YOU were from the future.

As for the particle shadows, I think it is worth sharing in detail so stay tuned for a video demonstration.

Watch Sample Video

NOTE: This sample video was rendered in After Effects with Particular using a 3D ball element as the particle texture. The ball was created in 3D Max, but you can make your own reflective orb in AE as shown in the Glass Orbs tutorial.

One of the many uses for a particle system plug-in like Particular is the ability 'visualize' music through the formation of particles. I've seen some amazing examples over the last few months and this is one of my experiments called Red Smoke.

Watch Sample Video

Download Project (CS4 & Particular 2 required)

About this Project:

After I extracted the keyframes from the audio amplitude, with this technique, I linked the particle birth and the velocity to the sound intensity with expressions. This made the bursts of particles shoot out farther for the louder notes and tighter for quiet parts.

The original comp was actually black with colorful particles (See sample) but I wanted to create something a bit more unique so I inverted the luminance and colorized part of it so it would be more dramatic Red on Black.

To get away from the sandy look of small particles I used a vector blur set to "Perpendicular" to blend it more naturally.

There are about a 2 million particles per frame so the render took about 4 hours but I lowered the rate while working to speed things up. I also offset the final audio a few frames to match the visual since the birth causes a slight delay.

Side Note: Harry Frank did a pretty in-depth tutorial at RGTV.

If you have any questions, post them!

I don't know what this is but I'm posting it. All I know is that it probably isn't going to end well for Sam.

In this tutorial we will combine smoke elements from Action Essentials 2 with a particle system to create a fluid natural transition. While watching think of other possibilities when combining other footage elements...

Watch Tutorial

View Sample video