The Twilight Project.....How?

Just thought I would share some of the techniques used to create this animation from scratch. First step was to get a reference image of what i was looking to create, in terms of style and movement.
here is the poster I used.




















First think i noticed was the Smokey atmosphere and the silhouetted trees. So i decided i would set my scene in the same location as these actors.
Next step was to create the back ground. I just Binged (its not that bad!) pictures of forests untill i found one i liked. this is what i found...


Then i just went through the process of overlaying different coloured layers and textures from my database of texture images to get the grungy old rusty look. And jsut like that i had a nice background to start my animation on.

One of the hardest parts of this project was to create realistic smoke.
I decided to generate my own smoke rather than compositing footage of smoke so that i can more control of how it moved.
here is a screen shot of the steps i used.

Firstly i created a simple particle generator that emits dots at a desired rate. then i duplicated it. distorted it. and finally blurred it.
When you have it layed out infront of you like that it seems rather simple, but to get a moving mass of dots to look close enough to realistic smoke, its a lot tougher than i made it out to be.

And finally the last little nugget of info i have was how i faded the title onto the scene. I used an effect called fractal noise which layers lots of noise ontop of each other, kinda looks like clouds. many of you might be familiar with this effect in photoshop. Well its teh same thing, except i added some animation to it and used it as a mask so that the text looked like it bleed into the scene like it was ink on paper.

And thats basically how i did it, hope you liked it!