In my quest to recreate a few of the Toaster transitions, I found Rick Gerard's tutorial on creating a lens aperture here on Creative Cow.
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/gerard_rick/Real_blades.php
However, I really couldn't follow along with the Illustrator part. In fact, the woman in our desktop publishing department couldn't figure it out, either. Instead, I just saved the image of the blade shape and traced around it in Photoshop. Thus, the "blade.psd" file.
Then, I followed along with the some of the tutorial about blade placement. I skipped the part about linking and all that stuff. I'm still learning AE and was a bit lost there. I just brute forced it and it works fine. I was toying with the idea of making the blade a new solid in AE and masking it out. But this is done and easy to use, so forget it.
I added a sound effect from Andrew Kramer's Sound Designer collection, but obviously I'm not redistributing that part. I highly recommend his products, found here:
http://www.videocopilot.net/index.html
You can find all sorts of camera sound effects online if you don't want to purchase his excellent set of sfx, though.
So, I put together this little "homage" to the Toaster camera lens transition. Feel free to render it out and use it for your projects.
Lens aperture AE project
