"Pouf" effect

I decided to do a bit more research on how i could do the "pouf" effect for the ghost.  I fired up Motion and started noting down every different effect which might be useful for our movie. From the short list I made, I picked out some smoke and magic dust effects which I might use.

Initially I went on youtube to try and find an easy way to create dust particles for the attic, but instead I found a good tutorial on "teleporter" effect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j89IGDkKkVQ

It  made use of things like Luma Matte, Fractal Noise etc..terms which I had never heard of before today. Basically it made the object disappear gradually and then it made use of an imported particle effect to make it look nice.

I tried this out on a quickly keyed out shot of the ghost using magic dusts (de-saturated) as effect.

Well, this didnt look very good. I wanted a more spontaneous effect..like a 'bang' and then disappear. I found the Surprise Shimmer effect in Motion. I imported it , de-saturated the colours and made it look brighter. I also used two instances of those..one on the upper body, and one on the lower part. (to cover up the whole object)

I thought this looked slightly better..but now I didnt like the way the ghost disappeared. I decided to go back to using the simple Fading out method I had found earlier. (refer to diary)

I deleted the luma matte and just simple applied a fast blur (0 to 200) in less than 1second.

Muuuuch better :)