For Anime - Adoration Sparks

Step 1 - Background

The setup follows a simple pattern:

In this case, a cloud texture morphs for our background. Remember that various colors have different meanings, such as yellow being friendship, red being love and passion or anger, blue being shy or sad or calm, and and. Find the right tone of that color for your background. Here, I mixed yellow and green, because I wanted to show a platonic, but fun friendship between two characters. Add a cloud texture and animate the Z offset.

TIP: Always remember to vectorize and extrapolate your animation for consistency!

Step 2 - Bubbles - 2 layers

We want two layers to suggest distance.

To create the bubbles, you add a cloud texture, enlarge it and use a colorramp on constant, so you have big round blotches. Blur the blotches and use another colorramp to create an outline shape for the bubbles, that fades to the inside.

Animate these at different speeds in the same direction, and it gives a parallax feeling. I strongly advise not animating these on the Z-axis, as they can cause popping and flickering. If you must, try it very slowly first.

Step 3 - Stars - 3 layers

All three layers consist of a cloud texture with glares on it. You do 3 layers:

Background - always behind your characters.
Middle - Always partially obstructed by characters (use depth or mist to create this mask)
Front - Always in front of characters.
These three layers give you a sense of interaction between your characters and the effect.

Animate them at different speeds:
Background - slowest
Middle - medium
Front - Fastest

I suggest doing this in even intervals for the best effect.

Step 4 - Finishing - Soft Blur and vignette

On top of all this, you can add a soft blur:

To do a soft blur, you use a blur node and a mix node. The mix node will be the factor.
First image - Clean image
Second Image - Blurred image (I suggest fast Gaussian, as it is the fastest)
Use the factor to determine how much the blur will dominate over the clear and don't overdo the blur. Max of 1 at relative size.

To make the vignette - you have several options, but primarily:
1) Use a mix node with the image output in 1 and white in the other and feed the white result into a lens distortion node. Set the distortion to 1. This gives you a spherical shape that fills the frame. Blur this to a size of 20-28 and add this over your result - adjust the brightness and color as you see fit for the project. Please, don't just make it white. At least a soft yellow - be conscious of your color choices.

2) You can now use this as a mask to add more motion to your result. If you wish, you can add a noise texture to the vignette and offset it to the Z-axis for some subtle movement and you can also color this slightly with a brighter color - please again, not white - to make it stand out a little over the background and the bubbles. Go with a matching color to prevent layers screaming against each other.

Step 5 - Node group

This part is voluntary, but I really do recommend you do it.

Every effect that you're going to use again and again, even if not super regularly, will save you time if you make it a node group and save it as part of your start-up file.

We need to build infrastructure for the nodegroup, so we can control it completely from the outside. Add value nodes for the offset animations and use Separate and Combine RGB nodes to control the offsets of the textures. You can use math nodes to alter the values from the value nodes, so you have one moving at half the speed of the other and so on.

Once you have everything setup - select everything that forms a part of the effect, except the value nodes (not the math nodes, they go inside too) and press Ctrl+G.

You should now see a lovely group node with the value nodes connected. Go into the node and set the default values for everything and define the outputs you'd like to have down the line, such as each section alone, for example:
- Image (which is everything)
- Background
- Bubbles
- Stars
- Vignette

On the input side, you can have the following:
- Image
- Depth map / Mist pass
- Background movement (controls the Z-axis)
- Background Color 1 (Allows you to add images as well - basis should be a cloud texture)
- Background Color 2 (Allows you to add images as well - basis should be a cloud texture)
- Bubbles size (controls X and Y scale - remember to half the X size in appearance, so it's square)
- Bubbles Offset X (controls 1 and math nodes adjusts the other)
- Stars offset-X (controls one offset and the math nodes alter the speed for the other two layers; you pick how you'd like it controlled)
- Glow Factor (connects to the mix node)
- Glow size (controls the size of the blur node)
- Vignette Mix (controls brightness mix of the Vignette - factor)
- Vignette movement (animates the Z-axis of the noise texture if you added one)

Step 6