flares

Macula Lutea started as a happy accident - I've been working on one of the projects and wrote a small script to control the movement of the lens flare. Due to the calculation error (my bad) the light source ended up in completely wrong spot, resulting in highly exaggerated flare on the screen. Rather than discard the mistake, I decided to pursue intentionally misusing flares and discovered an entire world of cool abstract imagery that can be created in this style.

This tutorial is a hybrid between the Automated Light Rig and Scrolling LED Text. We will be building an animated image map driven light array that can be used for for either cool light effects or easily controlled particle emission.

While the entire project can be completed within After Effects, I will also jump into Cinema 4D every now and then and show you a very easy way for creating quite complex light arrays and importing them back into AE.

Knoll Light Factory's most popular look - Chroma Lens 2, reproduced as a preset for Video Copilot Optical Flares.