Superbowl 53 Commercial – The Twilight Zone

If there was something memorable about Superbowl 53, it definitely wasn’t the match up between the Los Angeles Rams, and the Boston Patriots. Mid-way through the 4th quarter, the Patriots scored there first touchdown and the audience re-awoke from their deep sleep. The only life-saving parts of the games were the 3 minute intermissions when media time outs were taken for commercial breaks.

Featuring several good brands such as Olay, Budlight, and a few upcoming shows, one show, The Twighlight Zone featured a lengthy commercial for its upcoming program. Near the end of that commercial is a fabulous startling motion background the is strikingly simple, but at the same time, as that uneasy feeling about it. Perhaps it was the classic music and sound effects found at such a place as the Tower of Terror in Disney World.

In keeping with the spirit of a dull superbowl game, I decided to take a stab at recreating the background featured in that commercial. As always, it’s never exact, but its relatively close using some of the same look, technique, and colors. The original commercial can be viewed here:

In After Effects, I started off with a black background and then create a new layer with some fractal noise. I masked out most of the layer, animated the noise and then overlayed a tritone color effect to give it the purplish hue. That blended nicely in the background. For the particles, I used Red Giant Trapcode Particular and did a similar set up to the one in the commercial. I created two particle systems, one with faster larger particles, and one with smaller particles that didn’t move at all. On that smaller particles, I added a zoom blue to give them a motion blur look. That essentially is the basics to creating this background.

Perhaps one of these days, the Superbowl will be a time to see what cool new motion backgrounds are hitting the market, or, you can just check back here! Down this Twilight Motion Background here!