Combining Basic Animation Recipes To Create Special Effects

Parallax: The boat stays still while the waves zip by and the roostertail toggles.

Parallax: The plane stays still, but the clouds move at different speeds in the background and foreground.

Parallax: An advanced recipe with spinning loops on the wheels, toggling street cutouts, and fast and slow motion trees all combined in a loop!

Moving a character from near to far is tricky in 2D. Here is one way to do it.

From far to near a mosquito flies into the lens with a Splat!  

A little boom recipe for explosive animated moments.

A big cartoon "boom" formula with flare

Sometimes a little "Poof" is all you need

A classic tussle effect which clouds a dust up

Fall for this elegant drifting leaf formula using speeding up and slowing down formulas

Launch into this recipe with toggles and speeding up rocket smoke

Create water splash effects with this Belly Flop Formula

Get shaking with this rumbling recipe

Zooming in on this recipe will change your medium shots into smooth close-ups

Windows, ice, eggs and stones crack and shatter. Now you can too!

Flashes of brilliance with the lightning special effect recipe

Looping and cycling a flapping flag in the wind.

Toggling a flame with a slow motion smoke finale!

We are not in Kansas anymore with this twister toggling on a path.

Learning how to make basic surface wave effects will float your boat, or anything else nautical .

Using SloMO to create a lazy haze of smoke rising from a chimney. Sophisticated animators only. Patience pays off!

Three ways to deal with the physics of debris generated from different trajectories. Demonstrated with snow here, but usable with dirt, water, or any thing that kicks up after an impact.

An ingenious use of toggle. Creating the effect of streams trailing behind a flying object. Use with parallax for even better effect.

Water falling from a faucet using a simple toggle strategy. Also great for waterfalls!

Applying a two toggles to a path, create an animation of a huge frothy wave rolling through a scene.