Light Leaks

I watched an episode of The 100 tonight on Netflix, and I saw something I wanted to know how to do. I didn't know exactly what to search for so I typed in things like After Effects tutorial glow streaks and After Effects tutorial dream scene. As always, search results bring up new ideas for search terms so low and behold, I discovered light leaks. I narrowed my search to light leaks tutorials and voila, I found what I was looking for in this tutorial by Chris Truini. In the tutorial, he basically creates a solid, draws an ellipse mask, drags it off to the side, feathers it quite a bit, and drops the opacity to about 20%. To wrap it up, he adds a wiggle expression to the position, which makes it randomly move around on screen. When finished with one, he duplicates it a couple times, changes some of the parameters and voila, vintage, retro look accomplished.

I haven't mastered it yet, but I opened the door to a new creative avenue. I added five duplicates of the first layer. I moved one to the top, one to the bottom, one on the right third, and a big one that covered the whole shot.

Here's the before and after of the edit. I didn't make it super bold, but there's a bit more of a vintage look on the after video.

In working on this tutorial, I'm reminded that many of the effects that we learn in After Effects aren't mastered in one tutorial. They must be applied to multiple projects before really getting a handle on them. Every project requires a different look and feel, which means that the effect will need to be tweaked. Knowing just how to tweak it requires a great deal of practice.