After doing the Halloween video, I decided to give special effects another try. This idea had been floating around in my head for a while and here is the result. It’s not perfect, but I thought it was good enough to share.
If you’re curious, the main effects I used in Premiere Elements 8 were lightning, crop and corner pin. The pinning was almost a frame by frame effort as I manually tracked the movement of the paper. If I had $700 for After Effects I could have used motion tracking and the result would have been much cleaner. I also used a combination of blur and coloring effects to try to match the look of the paper. The strange background in the inset video is the result of using chroma key for a background that wasn’t uniform. I did it as an accident but thought it fit the overall look pretty well.
It’s amazing what you can accomplish with a few hours at the computer. We’ve come a long way since the days that we used to sit in the dorm room with multiple VCRs and audio input sources cabled together to attempt to mix videos.