Super 8 & Optical Flares

This past summer was one of the biggest blockbuster movies that I can remember. It was one of my favorite from the summer and made me feel like a kid again.

It's the story of a group of young boys who witness a train accident and all these strange events begin to occur. Granted a lot this seemed far beyond realistic since it was about aliens but I truly appreciated the story because it truly captured a kid. All kids want to do is play and explore. In the movie, all they wanted to do was explore and create their own movie based around what was happening



Another thing to point out were all the lens flares. For a few years, lens flares have become a very stylistic attribute to the image. These were seen in the 2009 Star Trek, which was also directed by Super 8's J.J. Abrams. Since learning After Effects, videocopilot.net has a package called Pro Presets, which contains Optical Flares. The person created Optical Flares, Andrew Kramer, worked on both of Abrams' movies to create these futuristic flares seen on screen.

I very much felt like I was watching ET since it was produced by Spielberg. These kids had some sort of a connection with this alien creature since they are sheltered as children like alien in previous time. All in all it was one of my favorite movies from the summer.