Lyric Video Production Guide - Sparks Particles Effect // Ep 1

Benefits:

• Low cost. You don’t have to buy any other plugins.
• No need in spending too much time on learning new software. Available even for beginners.

Disadvantages:

• Hard to get “3D” look
• Long rendering

1. Create new composition. It may be done in 2 ways: Through Composition > New Composition or just by clicking Ctrl+N

2. Create new black solid. Layer > New > Solid or just Ctrl+Y

3. Then we have to make Shape Layer. This layer will be our Particles layer with dusts or sparks.

4. Here we’ll choose particle Shape. It may be a square, or a round, or a triangle, or any other custom form. In this tutorial we’ll work with Round.

How to make a round here – just open Shape Layer 1 attributes and press Add button, then Ellipse. Looks like there are no any visible changes. Let’s add some fills and stroke effects to make it visible. Press Add one more time and choose Fill. Red color is default color, it may be changed of course. Particle size may be changed by clicking Triangle, which is opposite to Ellipse. (Little tip – if you want to create Oval shape, just press Chains symbol. You’ll be able to control width and height with this controller.)

Now, let’s digress a bit and do some housekeeping. Press Add one more time and create Group. Drag all the elements inside. Rename the group and shape layer.

5. Particle animation

Now we have to animate this particle element. Let’s make it start outside the screen.

a) Choose a layer with particle and drag it outside after effects Region of interest (just not too far).

b) Create a key (by pressing Clock symbol)

c) Go ahead few frames and move your particle inside of Region of interest

d) Repeat parapgraph “C” a couple times and get an effect of chaotic movement

e) You might be asking yourself (and us) – “should I make this for every second?!!!!1”. Sure, not. It might be simpler with Expressions.

6. Expression

LoopOut function allows to loop animation. There are much more parameters of course, but let’s keep an eye on Cycle and PingPong.

loopOut (“cycle”)

loopOut (“pingpong”)

Hold Alt and press Clock symbol. Then paste our expression code there. You’ll get looped animation as a result. Let’s take a look at this preview. Pretty nice, but we need some work for this. Let’s add some chaos and random movement here. For this, we’ll use one more basic expression – wiggle.

Wiggle (1,8) – if we take it closer, we’ll see that digit 1 means quantity of changes per second and digit 8 means meaning of this change. For example, with these meanings our particle will change position for every 8 pixels per 1 second.

I suggest to make wiggle (10,800). Apply this to particle and play the preview. Now we have chaotic movement, but where is a loop? Let’s make our expression a little bit more complicated.

A = loopOut (“cycle”);

B = wiggle (10,800);

A + B — value;

This code will add looped motion.

7. Blur and Glow effects

Let’s add these plugins to our layer with particle.

8. Quantity of particles.

Just duplicate this particle and get desired quantity. Motions will be different due to expression code for wiggle. One more tip – just move our copies a little bit and make different keys for every layer. Such move will make our particles completely different.

9. Ready!

Now, you can use such particles for your lyric video production or any other motion graphics video.