Flying thru Clouds

I've seen tons of Flash movies that have clouds that horizontally scroll by. It's kind of boring, don't you think? Here's a more interesting animated cloud effect.

The movie contains a single JPEG image of clouds (generated using the "clouds" filter in Photoshop. In the script, I make a few copies of this image and fade them in and out on a continuous cycle. As the movieclips fade in and out, they increase in size from 100 to 200%.

You can use as few as 2 copies for the effect to work, but here I'm using 3, which looks a bit nicer (but it's slower).

To avoid obvious repetitions, the underlying picture is randomly positioned on the x-axis each time it reaches zero opacity. Also the x and y scales are randomly negated (giving me a horizontal or vertical flip), to increase the variety.

You could also use this technique with other pictures to create interesting amorphous zooms.