Spicy Explainer VFX - Film Riot’s Extinction Sci Fi VFX Pack
If you’re here for the tutorial, I’m not going to make you scroll to the bottom of this post.
BUT if you want to know more about my process for the entire video this shot came from, I’ve got a full breakdown below.
Recently, I collaborated with local news station WCNC Charlotte and their lead meteorologist Brad Panovich to pilot a series of videos discussing the local effects of climate change.
I knew going into this project, it was going to be a challenge. I was going to have to design visuals to explain complex scientific principles in their most simple and digestible forms. Thankfully, Brad wrote an excellent script that gave me a great head start.
I broke out the script using the 2-column AV script format, like this one from Studio Binder. While shortlisting is common in most every kind of video production I’ve ever done, it seems more rare in local news production. Thankfully, I have the freedom and flexibility to take my time when producing these kind of videos.
That being said, I had a few days to shoot, edit and deliver the final video. This timeline did influence some of my shot decisions, making sure to keep things simple while trying maintain the video’s pace.
But one of the key moments in this video is describing the polar jet stream and how that is causing shifts in weather for the South Eastern U.S.
We had some royalty free footage from NASA that we used as inspiration and a placeholder in our first drafts. But I knew I wanted something better.
Now while this video is great to have, it is only 720p HD, and the style didn’t quite fit how the rest of the video was going to look.
As I started exploring ways to create an original visual effects shot to replace the NASA shot, it hit me that I had some assets that might just work.
I snagged these elements during their annual Black Friday sale, not knowing at the time when or how I was going to use them.
After getting some stars from PremiumBeat’s Space kit and a render of the earth from Pexels, I had everything I needed to rebuild the NASA shot from scratch.
After choosing my energy beams that would become the jet stream, I added the optics compensation effect to “bend” the energy beams around the curvature of the earth. I then added puppet points to the energy beams to add the waves like you see in the NASA clip.
To drive home the point that the polar jet stream’s waves are growing in height and depth, I animated the puppet points to grow and contract over the course of the clip. As an added bit of clarity, I parented two call-out text animations to some puppet points to line up with key words in the voice over.
After adding a 3D camera move to give the shot some parallax, I was done.
There’s definitely ways I wish I could have improved the shot, like using Video Copilot’s Orb plugin for the Earth instead of a still image, but I had to cut some corners because of the limitations of my work computer.
I’m very happy with how the shot turned out, and pleased that I was able to design and execute a relatively simple solution in 2.5D in After Effects without having to go into 3D software, which would have been more time consuming in both the design and render phases.
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