Re-imagining the paths of Elsewhere

The Dark Elsewhere paths first show up in Act III, and is used for the less hospitable parts of the world.

I always imagined Elsewhere as constantly shifting and drifting, the paths moving, and the world subtly shifting as reality bends to the magic and chaos. So I set out to try to replicate it.

The first step was to play with AI. I used MidJourney to generate 4 different versions inspired by the original source.

The AI versions are a little more 'unreal', I fed it references to magic, unreality and volumetric light to get it to pump it up a little.

After that it's back to After Effects. I start by just cross-blending the images (so one of the fades out, leaving the other one). It's a pretty simple effect, but since the images are quite similar things work out well. I want this to loop cleanly, so I make sure the last image is the same as the first one.

Next we need to add some effects. Here I'm using the 'ripple' effect, triggering each time I change. I also added 'godrays', formed by lights shining through fog/smoke. It helps with the lighting and gives the world a slightly unreal feeling.

I like using fog to add dynamic complexity. In this case I'm using two different stock videos, and cutting them to cross blend at different places. That'll make it harder to see that they're not actually looping on their own (smoke, being a chaotic compound, wouldn't ever actually loop properly left to its own devices).

Normally I'd use Screen to transfer the (black background) smoke to my image, but it's already a quite faded image, so I change the mode to "lighten".

So... what's left? Looking at that clip, it's way too fast, which will be distracting from the characters. I'm redoing it as 6x longer, with longer transitions and much longer pauses between the transitions. We'll see how it looks.

If this works I'll likely give a couple of the other Elsewhere locations (the dark shrine, the golden paths, and the Japanese paths) the same treatment. 

Hope that was interesting to some of you, as always let me know in the comments.