Using special effects in after effects!

Sometimes it is not enough to have a single shot or image on screen since it could be lacking in terms of depth or power which why special effects are often used to add a little more substance to the shots/images. In my group and I's case our production title was lacking in terms of both effectiveness and quality which made the introduction to our horror trailer look very shabby. We had to find a way to make the production title look more powerful without going with the easy option which is to simply change the font. So we decided to add some sort of special effects to production title... however adobe première pro was exactly our best friend at the time since although it did have some special effects that could be used, they just didn't really add anything to the production title and some of the looked just plain bad. Luckily there was another Adobe program that help us solve this problem. 


Adobe after effects was a software program that was design specifically for creating special effects for videos. The effects we decided to use was a glass shattering effects since it was a nice way to introduced the trailer and it relates to horror since often the killer in a horror film will break through a glass door or window in order to reach the victim (e.g. Ghost face in 'Scream' and Michael Myers in 'Halloween'). I was in charge of creating this effects my other group members were busy edit the trailer and since no of us had ever used this program I took it upon myself to understand it and be able use it effectively. At first the program itself was very user friendly and I was able to get the effect featured on screen and then mess around with the control options so that I could make the glass do all kinds of things (e.g. increase the rotation speed of the glass and it shatters, enable the glass to randomly disperse in any direction on every repeat etc). 

Once I finished messing around with the control settings I had to apply this effect onto the production title and export it as a 'Microsoft AVI' file. This is where it got frustrating since all of sudden the program made applying effects to imported media very difficult and even exporting the file was a pain in the ass. Luckily I was able to look up solutions to these problems on YouTube and soon enough I had the effect exported as a 'Microsoft AVI' file (turns out the clip had to be pre-render and tested as a RAM preview before being able to export properly) and was able to include it into the horror for the introduction and it made the production title look much better.