Heat Haze

Posted by Nick on 26 July 2011

Alright Juicers, this is a cracker of a tutorial. I've broken it down into a few bits too. The first video is a 3 minute segment lifted from the Pro Juice Television Series, Episode 3. It gives a nice overview of the effect we will be creating and the basic techniques involved. I've then included a more detailed screen capture version to enable you to follow along and try out the effect yourselves. Enjoy!

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To make the heat haze effect was basically a 3 step process.

Firstly I created a layer of fractal noise that evolved over time using an expression. I then used this layer as a displacement map for my main piece of footage. This essentially created the wavering, blurry look of a heat haze.

The second step was creating the watery reflections you often see in the forground. For this i used a range of masks, scaling and blend modes, along with a bezier warp.

The final step was colour correcting to make the warm reds and oranges associated with shooting in hot conditions.

There's two versions of this video. The first is taken from the first Pro Juice series and is a shortened version covering the concept. The second has a screen capture that goes into more detail.

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