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DECEMBER 02, 2003 After Effects Project: Squiddies
The effect itself is pretty easy to figure out. Wave Type allows you to select from a variety of wave shapes. For this exercise, the default Sine wave is what we want. Wave Height determines how much distortion is going to happen. If we would have cropped the Cable layer to the edge of the image, we would not have any room to move around. However, because the Cable image was saved with plenty of wiggle room, the distortion looks natural. [an error occurred while processing this directive]  Wave Width should really be called Wave Length as it sets the length of the wave. Wave Speed determines how fast the wave moves. A couple of things I have discovered while using this effect – first for a natural flowing wave, the wave height should be half (or less) of the wave length. In this exercise, set the Wave Height to 40 and the Wave Length to 160. Second, the speed is going to be dependant on how fast the object is moving across the screen. For this exercise, the microphones swim across the screen in roughly 3 seconds. To match the movement, I set the Wave Speed to 1.5. Direction determines the direction of the wave movement. Because the microphone is moving across the screen left to right, change the direction to -90. Pinning allows you to prevent the effect from affecting a portion of the image. Since the cable is attached to the end of the microphone, it would be best if that portion of the cable didn’t move. So, Pinning is set to the Right Edge.  The original cable is a bit too long for this project. It also ends abruptly. To fix this, I simply drew a rectangle mask around the cable and then feathered the mask. This causes the exposed end of the cable tail to blur and fade out.  Finally, animate the Position of the Microphone layer across the screen. If you want to try fancy swimming stunts like the last swimming mic in the above animation, turn on Auto Orient.  Experiment with other variation of Wave Warp and see what results you come up with. You can download the entire project and files in Sit format here.  When not working deep in the labs of the DMN Central Division testing the latest and greatest software/hardware products Stephen Schleicher can be found at the local university teaching a few courses on video and web production. He can be reached at schleicher@mindspring.com. You can also visit him on the web at www.mindspring.com/~schleicher
Related sites: • Animation Artist • Animation Supplement • AV Video • Creative Mac • Digital Animators • Digital Producer • Digital Video Editing • DV Format • Siggraph News • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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