The project came about as a fusion of an old project of mine with a recent commercial project I was working on. Initially, it involved using black and white video of hands moving on a blank background as a mask to displace gird of strings down as if they were touched by these invisible hands, but I really wanted to take it on a next level and add some dynamics to it.

I really had difficult time and many attempts before I figured out how can I combine these two techniques to produce an outstanding result. And the key trick here is to use movement vectors from video acquired with Optical Flow in DaVinci Resolve to drive simulation.

After some research on how to get these vectors in Resolve I used the Red and Green color as a vector to respectively drive X and Z wind forces in Vellum simulation. It took few attempts and constraint tweaks before the result was what I intended to achieve. Once I was happy with the moment of strands I added a little turbulence to add some organic movement to them. Finally, there was just one little thing left to do - add lights, set up scene and give it a render using Redshift.

Thanks for watching!