Today we experimented with motion tracking in after effects. Firstly we recorded some simple footage of the building. We did a simple pan to make the motion tracking easy.
Motion tracking works by selecting a group of pixels and for after effects to look for within a given area. You also select an attach point for objects to hold on to. We selected the top left window because it is a point that remains constant throughout the clip and is reasonably well defined.
Once we had created the track data, we assigned this to a new null object. This would be the point that the rest of our footage would follow.
We then created some simple smoke the same was as we did in the titanic title sequence. We used the particle playground, gaussian blur and tritone effects to create the effect. We then attached this smoke to the null object and adjusted the anchor point to make the smoke appear as if it was coming from a window.
