Pole Dance

 Pole Dance Filmed Reference, post in After Effects

Chasing a Ghost from the 80s

18. Okt. 2026 · @christoph nacken garcia

Where it started

It started with a GIF. One of those little loops that drifts past you online and somehow stays in your head for days.

It showed a light effect straight out of very early computer graphics. The kind of thing you'd have seen on a TV screen in the 80s, when everything glowed and nothing looked quite real. I still can't properly describe it. Glowing lines, shifting colors, light that seemed to live inside the image rather than on top of it.

I didn't know what it was called or how it was made. I just knew I wanted to try building something like it myself.

The raw material

For the base I went back to a piece of stock footage I had bought a while ago: a pole dancer, which I slowed down for this piece.

It turned out to be the perfect subject. A single figure, clear silhouette, slow and flowing movement. Exactly the kind of shape that light effects love, because the eye can follow the body even when the image itself is breaking apart into stripes and color.

Building it in After Effects

I found a tutorial and used it as a starting point, then went my own way pretty quickly.

The core idea was to treat the dancer not as one image but as several. I made different color versions of the same clip: a golden one, a green one and a red one. Then I stacked them on top of each other and shifted them slightly against each other, so the colors split apart at the edges like a badly aligned old monitor.

The effect chain looked roughly like this:

1. Color Range to pull the dancer out of the footage, keyed in Lab color space with a soft edge.
2. Posterize Time at 12 fps, which gives the movement that slightly stuttering, low-tech feel.
3. Tritone to push the colors, in my case pink highlights, golden midtones and lavender shadows.
4. Levels to clean up the contrast.
5. Displacement Map, driven by luminance, which bends a pattern of vertical lines along the shape of the body.
6. Glow, quite strong, with a large radius, so the lines start to burn like light on a tube screen.

On top of everything sits a TV effect, to give the whole thing that video look. Then I rendered it out.

Not what I aimed for, and that's fine

To be honest: I didn't get there. The result doesn't look like the GIF that inspired it. Whatever was going on in that loop, I haven't cracked it yet.

But somewhere along the way the experiment turned into its own thing. It still has that aesthetic: the glowing stripes, the color split, the stutter of the low frame rate, the feeling of watching something on an old screen. It says what I wanted it to say, just with a different accent.

Sometimes a failed copy ends up more interesting than a perfect one would have been.

https://chris-garcia.art/