A lot of people ask me how I did the first shot of the film Polar (an opening trailer for the French film festival "Polar dans la ville") and I must say it is quite easy with Trapcode Particular.

Click here to read the article on creating this entire project.

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First I shot a very nice photo from a journey in Croatia.

I rotoscoped 10 clouds of this picture, put them into
particular, and made a box emitter

I used of course random size to make look them more than 10. I tried to make them move BUT when you create a lot of particles that are very close from each other, some flicking may appear. And it was the case with this. I could not use, turbulence or wind or velocity because if I did that a cloud may come in front an other in image A and then be behind it in the image B… and produce flicking.

So I decided to make a fratal noise in a 3d comp with the same mouvement of camera that my particular comp and use it as a diplacement map.

An other big problem is the mouvement of the camera itself. Particles in Particular are always showing the same face so when you move your camera, particles are oriented toward camera. So for the last frames I used a photo of real clouds to make a transition. (in fact 95% of the
clouds are Particular ones)

I used the vector blur to link all the Particular clouds… added some smoke, shine to make the sun, again used Particular for the birds and a matte painting for the background.