I posted this over at gimptalk and thought I would do so here as well. For some time I had it in the back of my mind trying to do an animation with a lit fuse, like is shown on the opening Mission Impossible Theme:



Here is my result thus far:



The "sparking" portion of the fuse is made simply by taking a flattened octagon on a transparent background. Then I duplicated it to make a total of 20 layers of that octagon. Then I applied Filters | Filter All Layer to it and applied the Spread noise filter set at a value of 35 to each layer. Since the Spread filter appears to be applied randomly to each layer, it sort of makes this sparking looking animation.

I used GAP to move the sparking animation from the left side of the screen to the right and I also used an animated Layer Mask to make the fuse look like it's getting shorter.

Thanks for checking it out.



It would also be possible to show the beginning of the fuse being lit as they do in the Mission Impossible opening, where someone's hand strikes a match to light the fuse. That would involve taking a video of the match lighting and then compositing it with the animated fuse, and that could be done in GAP.

Whoa! I love your Wilber background and "Mission Gimpossible" describes the operation perfectly.

I'm going to have try your fuse animation. That's very cool. Great work, ccbarr!

Excellent result CC; like the sparkle effect of the fuse; good result for such a simple way of creating it.

I definitely love this effect. Imagine it giving off fire sparkles and leaving a black char residue as it burns across. Lots of potential here. Thanks ccbarr!

Nicely done and welcome to Gimp Chat.

x2

Excellent ccbarr. The original Mission Impossible sure brings back memories too...

I have 20 layers and tried filtering all layers, I used Apply Varying the first time and it only did it to one layer so went back and tried Apply Constant and, again, it only did it to one layer.

I started out with all layers visible and the only layer that was visible after applying the filter was #1, the rest were invisible. That happened with both applications. None of the invisible layers were "noised."

Never mind. I missed that dialog box that came up to continue. Somehow it got minimized to the task bar. It works fine.

This is what I have so far. Thinking of making a somewhat snaking wick path and have the fire traveling along that path. I need to read up about the animating layer mask. I know it was discussed in GTalk some time ago and hope I can find that discussion.

looking good so far "O"

Thanks, molly.

Now I have it on a path. All I have to do now is make a wick on the path and figure out the layer masking. My path may be a little too busy and I need more frames to make it smoother.

Thank you all for your kind comments.

O,

I'm glad that you thought of the idea of the fuse following a curved path because that is the next step. Having a winding curved fuse that gets lit and burns down. Also, nice to see you added a gradient effect to the sparking animation. The animation can also be used for making sparklers.

Making your animated layer mask for a curving path is a little work to set up, but not too bad, and the effect is pretty neat.

It can be interesting to also experiment with trying different basic shapes for making the sparking animation. I used, as I said, I more flattened octagon for this one, but also tried a square and circle before settling on the octagon in this animation.

I've been trying some other methods of producing an interesting sparking effect. If I find something else interesting, I'll try to post that here as well.



mahvin,

Neat idea of leaving behind a char residue as the fuse burns. That one could also be handled with a separate additional animated layer mask.

It's the spirit of people adding to original ideas like this that also makes these forums enjoyable to be part of. And please, anyone feel free to use this animation concept or add to it as you wish. Have fun with it.

lylejk,

Thanks for the comment about the simplicity of the method. I like using simple approaches as much as possible to achieve an effect. Hopefully that makes it easier for others to make use of it.

Again, thank you to everyone for commenting.

I never even knew that feature was available. I was always filtering each layer individually. *smacks forehead*

Filter All Layers is an awesome part of Gimp. I use it a lot with Map Object for animating cubes, spheres, etc.