I created the avalanche in Blender 2.54 and I must say I was very pleased with the results. I love that we now can create such awesome effects and animations so easily these days.

Soon I’ll have the videos ready. Please come back later.

After completing my Doritos contest entries for 2011, I found that many people were curious about how I did all the effects and edits for such an ambitious project.

Take a look at the entries here:
Have a few
Fantacy

In this tutorial series, I will explain the process in which I built the avalanche effect and composited it together. In a nutshell, I first took the shot into Blender and built around the mountain to pour the chips on. Then, I created the chip objects (about 5 separate objects for a random look) and made a particle system for the avalanche. This took a bit of tweaking to get it to ‘pour’ right and get the look I wanted. Then render the chips as an image sequence. After that, I brought them all into Shake and composited it all together. Then render that clip out and bring into the complete edit using Final Cut Pro. No sweat!

Here is a list of the tools I used:
Canon Rebel T2i (550D)
Azden shotgun mic
5 ft. home made mini jib
Blender 2.5 (for 3D avalanche, particles and physics)
Shake 4.1 (for compositing)
Final Cut Pro
Soundtrack Pro

So to get started, here is the part 1 video: Breakdown.

As of this minute, if you happen to see my site and the video is not here, please come back soon. I’m still recording the videos and I have not uploaded them yet.