Patreon Peeks 18: Waking Up From a Nightmare in After Effects (Patreon)

Hello! This week, I wanted to cover a small but potent effect I used in my video about Five Nights at Freddy's, from this October. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yTIhtfgDwY

At around 1:30 in the video, I talk about how, if FNAF were an actual nightmare, there wouldn't have to be any concessions of information or agency to you, the viewer/player. To transition out of the current graphics on screen, I had the challenge of depicting a nightmare wresting the current information from view. I thought of the visuals somehow cracking or dissolving into red, and I eventually implemented that using a very useful effect in After Effects: Generate Fractal.

After Effects comes with a fractal generator effect that can display the Mandelbrot or Julia sets, with robust coordinate and zoom features, and a variety of options for coloring. For this scene, I zoomed in on a facet of the Mandelbrot set, and then "animated" the set by changing the escape limit of the fractal.

Real quick, the escape limit is part of a coloring algorithm for visualizing the Mandelbrot set. I'll try not to get more technical than I already have: the equation that creates the Mandelbrot set is plotting how quickly its output diverges to infinity. Computers visualize the Mandelbrot set by asking how quickly that equation gets to some number smaller than infinity, and colors points accordingly, creating beautiful gradient patterns. So, the escape limit here is controlling at what point the computer defines the boundaries of the Mandelbrot set. A smaller limit will show less of the Mandelbrot's signature shape, with less complexity.

So, over time, the escape limit of this fractal gets smaller, and thus the fractal appears to ebb away. I colored the entire fractal black, since I'm only interested in its shape, not its color information. Then, I gave the edges of the fractal a stroke of red and an orange outer glow. The red edge increases in thickness over time and experiences slight turbulence as it gets really big, to make the edges of this transition look strange, textural, and visceral. Here are three frames of the effect:

High escape limit (150), thin red edge:

Less escape limit (85), thicker red edge:

Small escape limit (40), thickest red edge, turbulent displacement:

The effect produces a very uniquely shaped frame wipe that accelerates and snatches everything away at once. The final step was to mask every object on screen to this layer, so that it looked like the red edges consumed the content:

And that's the nightmare scenario of this week! Sorry for something creepy, but it just goes to show the amazing and varied artistic applications of fractals!