Love of Magic, Act VII: Fun with AE

It's a simple enough image, though something about the look in his face made me want to try to add some real effects to this. To do that we need him in After Effects. 

There's a couple of different things happening here, so let's break it down. I added a background and box-blurred it to take it out of focus.

There's 3 distinct layers to this; the background, the stock fog footage and the character/effects layer. I set them all up as 3D layers, and change their Z depth to get some parallax movement when I animate the camera.

The next step is breaking down the VFX layer.

There's actually three distinct effects going on here: two of them are AE's built in Advanced Lightning, the last is a free plugin called Saber from the amazing people at Video Copilot. I use Saber a lot for the various magical effects; it looks great, runs fast and is really easy to control; it sees use in magical swords, fireballs, the glowing eyes (like here), where a human's magic output exceeds what their human flesh can handle, etc.

For the lightning I'm using the same texture as the character; that lets me use the Alpha outline to control the lightning a bit; lightning's supposed to be chaotic, but I still prefer to have it follow the edges of things a little.

So that's the full thing; I quite like how it looks in motion, and it was just 30 minutes of playing around to create it, compared to the hundreds of hours of animating, rendering and compositing that went into the Act VII capstone cutscene.