Particles

Wow last little project for class. Scaryyy.

Anyways, for this project I thought I'd add some effects to an animation that I'd already made. The animation storyline itself was supposed to have rain, but I didn't know how to do rain with paper and stop motion, so I left it out. But, with After Effects and Particles I was able to add the effect I wanted.

The only thing I dislike about particles is how silly they can look. I think my snow looks pretty cool, and perhaps my rain, but the fire just looks terrible. Honestly, I wouldn't have added fire but I needed five particle systems to make. But, I really like that I could add a little debris from the birdhouse breaking that shoots towards the camera because I wasn't able to do that with my stop motion. I guess I have pretty mixed feelings about particles, they are useful in some situations, but in others they are really ugly.

I guess this post sort of sums up how I feel about CG effects in the first place. I really like organic, hand animated effects, they look more natural and are more impressive. I like to think of the fire that I made for this project (which is really bad, I'm not going to lie, particles are definitely not my forte) versus the PES video where they use candy corn to represent fire. It looks better, even though it's made of candy.That being said, sometimes it is really hard to do everything by hand, for example, rain effects out of paper. In that case, I would definitely want to use CG. I guess I compare CG particles to cooking with salt, use sparingly, but in some cases it is necessary.