With this technique and Adobe's After Effects Production Bundle you can add variety of effects, such as smoke and fire, as well as an abstract "flowing" for a visual element.

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Create your title first. It doesn't necessarily have to be a title, but any small visual element, such as a logo, that you may wish to draw attention to.

Use the pre-composition of the size, enough to enclose all the potential size of the flowing effect. I will call this composition FXSubject for future reference.

Please use this screen shot as a reference.
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Now, It's time to create the FXMatte composition. Use the same size as for FXSubject. This will be an intermediate image, used to locate the effect action over the initial image. I used animated turbulent noise (CE Turbulent Noise from Cult Effects) and an oval mask on a moving layer. It is not necessary to use the CE plug-in. You just need any kind of stochastic motion, like a time-lapse clouds shot, or just a pre-composition of moving black and white spots. The latter is even preferable, because you can tune the effect more precisely if you create each spot individually.

The mask and position animation is used to reveal the actual, undistorted image. You may also wish to apply the Levels effect in this comp and set the red channel's Output Black value to 128. You will also need two extra intermediate comps. FXDisplacement includes FXMatte as a layer. It is different from FXMatte only in that it is includes a 50%-gray layer as a background. This gray layer is needed for the Displacement Map because gray value means zero displacement.

FXBlur also includes FXMatte and applies the Curves effect with special settings: black color turns to white, gray color turns to black, white color to white. The RGB curve should look like an upturned triangle. This is done to avoid blurring undistorted areas.

Create a composition (referenced as Flow on the chart) that will be used for the effect itself. Put these three compositions in it: FXBlur, FXDisplacement and FXSubject. Turn off visibility for both FXDisplacement and FXBlur layers. Apply Compound Blur and Displacement Map effects to the FXSubject layer. In Displacement Map, specify FXDisplacement layer as a Map layer, in Compound Blur, specify FXBlur layer.

Tune the controls of displacement map to achieve the effect you need. Animate opacity value for the FXSubject layer if necessary. Also, you may wish to animate the opacity value of the spots in the FXMatte layer. Use the Levels and Glow or whatever you want to control the final image of the flow. With these two, you can color your flow to look like fire, smoke or something unreal.

Click on the image above to view the QuickTime movie.

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