Maltaannon's House of Form

Red Giant is hosting a video tutorial from Motionworks training DVD 'Making it Look Great 5.' In "Form Face" Maltaannon creates a push pin toy effect as seen in the Radiohead “House of Cards” video using Trapcode’s Form plug-in -- which is being promoted with a 30% off sale.

While Trapcode Form is cool and deep, a poor man might approximate this effect by finessing built-in AE filters, easier said than done with Ball Action (with Brighten Twist) and some tinting & maybe displacement. On another tangent Toolfarm has a nice older tutorial by Harry Frank called "Rippling Circles" that uses Ball Action and other Cycore plug-ins.

Update: Form Face: Judgement Day… er… Part 2 is available.

Update 2: from India's Festival of Colors:

Update 3: the Maltaannon tutorials made it onto Adobe.TV, where you can see them in HD. Here's a baby part 2 Episode 12: Form Face - Part 2:

Update: the blue must be doing a number on the senses, since this stuff doesn't seem that different from Ball Action plug-in stuff as in 3D Ball Dispersion with CC Ball Action,

or Audio Analysis in After Effects by Satya Meka, done with built-in tools,

Audio Analysis w/Expressions from Satya Meka on Vimeo.