This fun blur from the Cycore Effects that come bundled with Adobe After Effects. It looks at a second layer as a map to determine how much to blur an image by, and in what direction. The results are often surrealistic:
https://youtu.be/yB-r3gQfXV8
Not an effect you’re going to use every day, but certainly a great one to pull out of your bag of tricks when you want a look you haven’t seen a thousand times already.
These movies previously appeared in our Insight Into Effects course on Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning. They’ve retired that course from their library, so we’re making them available publicly for free.