Free Turkey Give Away
My fondest Thanksgiving memory is of Les Nessman and the rest of the WKRP crew throwing turkeys out of a helicopter as part of their big Turkey give away campaign. Too bad they didn’t know turkeys couldn’t fly. Here’s a fun (and safe) way of recreating that scene.
Step 1: Open After Effects and import your turkey file and sky image by pressing Command+I on the Mac or Control+I on the PC. [an error occurred while processing this directive] Sorry folks you’ll have to find your own turkey and sky images for this tutorial. Do a search on the web, and you will surely find the turkey image you desire. You should create an alpha channel for the turkey in Photoshop for this to work correctly.
Step 2: Create a new composition by pressing Command+N on the Mac or Control+N on the PC. Name the composition "The Sky is Falling". Set the duration to five seconds, and use the DV NTSC preset (or PAL, if you celebrate T-day in other countries).
Step 3: Drag your turkey image from the Project Window to the Comp Window. Make sure the Layer Quality for the turkey layer is set to Best.
Step 4: Because you won’t need to actually see the turkey layer for this exercise, drag your sky background and place it above the turkey layer in the Timeline Stack.
Step 5: Create a new solid by pressing Command+Y on the Mac or Control+Y on the PC. Name the solid "Turkey Particles". Make the solid the same size as the Comp and press OK.
Step 6: From the Effect menu select Effect>Simulation>Particle Playground. Particle Playground is a particle generation system for After Effects that can do some pretty amazing things; sparks, fire, and even falling turkeys.
Step 7: In the Effect Controls window use the twirl down arrow to display the adjustments for the Canon property. Because you want the turkeys to fill the entire screen, change the Barrel Radius to 350 (half the width of the Comp Window).
Step 8: With a radius this size, the position of the Canon also needs to be adjusted to Turkeys just don’t pop on the screen. Move the position of the canon to 360, and -350.
Step 9: You are almost done with the Canon settings. Change the Direction to 180, so the particles that are created are falling down instead of being forced up and then falling down.
Step 10: Close the Canon property and twirl down the Layer Map property. The Layer Map actually allows you to take other layers in the Timeline and map them to the particles. For our falling turkey stunt, you need to change Use Layer to (you guessed it) your turkey layer.
If you make a RAM preview now, you will notice all of the turkeys that are created fall in a straight line. This isn’t very life like. The turkeys need to rotate as they fall.
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