Zap! or others that know sparks.

I'm working on a film for a local festival rotoing the sabrbes tonight, theres one shot in which someones sabre grazes the ground, and I thought it'd be rad to throw some SPARKS in there.....thing is, I dont know how to do them.

Any tutorials out there.

programs - After FX pro 5.5
- Premiere 6

 

no one knows any like particle style tutorials for After Effects?

 

ok, this is pretty old school i suppose, but one way to do them i've found is to actually draw and animate the sparks yourself with vector paint (in AE). I know that sounds ridiculous and time consuming, but you can actually get pretty good results, providing you have a good eye for 2d animation and the ability to concentrate on small details for a long time. If you had a 3D application you could concievably create a plane that mimcs the ground in the shot and blow some particles out of the cut and use motion blur etc etc and then composite them in...that may be more work than you want or need.

Anyway, i havent found a good way to do realistic sparks using the particle playground yet. Maybe somebody else does; it would be nice if they would share it with us.

 

Use stock footage. Or film some sparks in front of black. Then key the black out.

SWmaster

 

oh yeah, i should have said that, you can film a lighter sparking in the dark and composite it in...dont know if it will look like big sparks though...

 

3D particle Generator in AE 5.5

Click on the main graphic, then go to tutorials and then AE 5.5. It's in there. Kind of a hefty tutorial, but it works if you can make your own particles.

You might just want manually animate it though.

Good luck!

 

I filmed real sparks. I tried to make some with particles but it's like always, the real thing if you can.

Here are some I did. Sorry bad compression gonna fix that some day.

/Z

 

PERFECT!!!! thanks guys!

 

Or you can do it the official, Lucasfilm way... draw it on.

[image=http://index.echostation.com/trilogy/boltsparks.jpg]