Subtitles of the Movie

Dynamics are simulations that allow you to shatter things, to have your own particle generator so you can create fireworks or rain, fog, rocket exhaust, all kinds of good stuff and you'll find that, of course, in the Effect Category. Now one thing I want to point out is when you use a dynamic system, I highly suggest that you do it on a solid layer. Let me demonstrate why. Notice that I have my image here. If I go to Effect and I go to Simulation and I choose Particle Playground, notice how my artwork is gone because the particles will now live on that layer. So what you want to do is to preserve your artwork, add a solid so that the particles or whatever system you apply will live on that. Also I highly suggest you change the color to black. That way you can add a blend mode so you can see what you're doing. For example, I'll right click on the Solid, choose Blending Mode and I'll choose Screen. That gets rid of the black but the solid is still there. Now if I go to Effect, Simulation and choose Particle Playground, here is my particle system, also known as an emitter. But in After Effects, this guy right here that shoots the particles is called a Cannon. So let's say you want to make your own fog coming out of this lake. What I can do is take my cannon and I can go to my barrel, make the barrel a little larger and I can also increase the amount of particles and I can change the direction, the velocity and all that kinds of stuff and even add some gravity to the particles if I want to. I can also have the color of the particles match something in the scene. So I can click on the little Swatch here and grab the Eyedropper and click on a part of the water. So let me make sure I grab some of this here. I'll go over to this area. It looks good, the grayish area. Click OK and then I'll have that nice color that matches the environment. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to just scrub my mouse in the timeline and notice right away we have this effect of this water coming out of that cannon. Now, of course, it doesn't look very watery at the moment but what we can do with particles is we can apply other effects to them. For example, a blur. So once again I'm going to hit my Spacebar so we can just see what it looks like. You can make your own snow or anything. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to grab another effect, I'll go to Blur. I'll choose a pretty fast one. I'll choose Fast Blur and I'm going to then increase the blur until I have something that looks like most from this emitter. So I'll hit the Spacebar again and let's see if we have anything here. It's kind of calculating a lot of stuff. And I'm going to just move my mouse and there you go. You see that mist right there coming out of the emitter? It's a little hard to see so I'll drop the fog down just a little bit and I'll just go ahead and let that render. Hopefully now you can see that more clearly; got this nice little bit of steam or mist coming off the water. So that's an example of how you can use an emitter to add all kinds of dynamics to After Effects scenes. Just use your imagination, add a blur here and there and just play around with all the parameters of the particles to find the effect that you're looking for.