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April 23, 2005
Brain Scanner
It’s difficult to miss the Brain Scanner animated GIF (pronounced JIFF for those of you who until now have pronounced the acronym incorrectly). This was created in After Effects 6.5 Pro (hereafter referred to as “AE”) using several tricks.
First of all, I grabbed a picture of an authentic human brain from somewhere out in the ether (Google), brought it into AE and applied the Colorama Effect to it. Colorama has the fantastic ability to remap gray values to many interesting color palettes and even allows you to animate the palettes. This is an old trick in computer graphics and it’s nice to be able to do it in AE.
Secondly, I created a Mask around the brain image and used the mask to create an Alpha Channel for the Brain.
Then I brought the color-animated and alpha-channeled brain composition into another composition where I added the Advanced Lightning effect.
The Advanced Lightning effect is quite beautiful, as you can see, and allows you to use the Alpha Channel of the layer to which you apply it to “teach” the lightning where to travel as it were. This is why the lightning seems to wrap itself around the edges of the Brain as it seeks its way from point A to point B. The lightning effect complements the evolving solarized blue color changes of the brain itself.
The last step was to render the animation in high quality and bring it through Adobe ImageReady CS, which has the fantastic ability of turning a Quicktime Movie into a well-compressed Animated GIF for posting.
For those of you who have a copy of After Effects 6.5 Pro (or if you’ve downloaded the 30-day Demo from Adobe’s Website), you can inspect the source documents to see exactly how this animation was constructed.
Posted by Nathan Dickson at April 23, 2005 11:42 AM