I was inspired by a vfx instagram reel about how to do this effect in After Effects.

It took two steps:

1. Trace out an object to push it to a higher layer, so stuff you add can go behind it. This is called rotoscoping. This step is way faster nowadays!
2. Add the 3d stuff.

To do step 2, the guy in the reel pasted in a huge ad-hoc script into After Effects, and I thought, this 3d stuff is really the domain of dedicated 3d computer graphics software, rather than traditional 2d video editing software.

I figure that any 3d effect that can be done by video editing software can be done better by dedicated 3d computer graphics software, since it's all just math at the end of the day. And if you use three.js, which I have really gotten into recently, you get the added benefit of making it interactive and web-based.

Lately I've been obsessing over interactive 3d computer graphics as a medium, and how underrated it is. Seeing that reel makes me want to see what techniques the traditional 2d video people have been doing (it's a decades-older field), and try to adapt those techniques.

I'll try to do that, but ultimately, each medium has its own strengths and weaknesses, and I expect that lots of techniques will simply not benefit from the adaptation I'm trying to do. But regardless, I expect it to be a good educational experience to learn about what the 3d stuff can do better, just like how modern creative writers have to read the Classic Greek literature and so on.