Agreed, I was a bit perplexed by that too. I do like it (because I hobby in After Effects myself) but it didn't strike me as especially realistic. I presume the TNW writer was referring to the pretty degradation of the colored smoke, but I couldn't help noticing the heavy use of blur and particle systems, especially as the material got more complex on screen.
It's a very fine piece of work; maybe the blog author just got a little carried away by his emotional response to it.
If you're worked on (or have seen) anything better, care to post a link?
Note: I'm not doubting you - I actually thought the video clip looked beautiful so I want to know what you mean when you imply it could have been done better.
It's "realistic" in the sense that the animation seems driven by music data input. He wired the graphics to respond to processed music signals and added some additional (random?) inputs.
I'm actually more impressed byt his one! You are right though, the one in the OP is heavily modulated by spectrographic data from the music. After effects include a crude plugin for this purpose, but the OP animation used a 3rd party one that is constrainable to a particular frequency window.
Apple's Motion is also very good in this area, including responding to MIDI which is a royal pain to achieve with AE - particularly annoying to me since I have several MIDI devices and would love to be able to generate keyframe data by twiddling knobs I already have. Ho hum...anyone know of dynamic midi resources for Javascript (ie not just passing a midi file to the audio driver)?
It's a very fine piece of work; maybe the blog author just got a little carried away by his emotional response to it.