In a previous post Jim talked about doing a believable shake on the 3D camera itself. With motion blur turned on this can get a bit expensive as far as render times. Sometimes we lean on After Effects to push a shake to even greater extremes.
In this example you’ll see a 2D shake added to enhance the launch sequence. Now on the flat screen the shake doesn’t seem to be all that extreme, but on a dome it feels much more intense. In the last shot of the sequence I did a 3d Camera shake, and felt it needed to be pushed more. Rather than re-animate, we used After Effects and did a 2D wiggle on top of the existing shake to get the desired look.
I do this by using the Wiggle Expression in After Effects. [wiggle(a,b)] where a= frequency of the wiggle per second, and b= how much or amplitude.
I link them to sliders so I can animate how much wiggle I want. Now that I have a wiggler ready to go, I wiggle a null. The location of the null will be the center point of the wiggle. Once you’re ready to go, parent your footage to the null.
Now depending on how comfortable you are with After Effects I might have lost you. So feel free to watch the following tutorial about wiggle, and its various uses.