5 Simple Horror Effects

it's spooky season and we love spooky season it's easily my favorite time of year where we watch and make lots of horror So today we're going to take a look back at five horror effects that we did in the past that you can use on your next project first up is a fun one a really simple way to get a great end result like this want to have a staring contest sure if you want to lose ready go [Music] for this effect you're going to need a photo editor and compositing software we used after effects and Photoshop but whatever you have is going to work fine to start off we put two pieces of tape on our actor's face for tracking then in Premiere I went through and found a frame grab that would work for Corrections then brought that into Photoshop I'll start in liquefy which does a great job of finding facial features in the image so you can just start dialing things in a direction I'll make the eyes bigger and move them apart then I'll raise the nose height and drop the width tweak the mouth a bit and leave the face shape options alone for now but this is the base we can take it a little further manually we have our warp tool that lets us move things around a bit including messing up the shape of her jaw here and her hair behind the jaw is going to be great for hiding the seams of that later on we can mess with the eyes too maybe make one lower than the other then I'll jump into the pucker tool which is just a great name but with this tool we're going to make the nose a bit smaller and I think we'll stick with that now click okay and get rid of these tracking markers just by selecting them and then using content aware fill and while we're at it I'll get rid of her eyebrows too using the same method this doesn't work fully right off the bat so we'll use a cloning tool to clean up the remaining bits now we'll mess with the color of her face there's plenty of ways that you could do this I like doing it with an overlay so you could use a texture or color then put that into a blending mode to react to her skin for this I'm going to duplicate her layer and then use the Dodge tool to brighten up her face and use a mask to clean up the edges so this isn't affecting her hair which is giving us a nice pale odd look but now I'm going to duplicate this layer and then put that into Vivid light blending mode this gives us a burnt looking feel which goes too far so I'm going to dial it back with opacity then I'm going to mask out the center of her face so it's just on the edges and finally for her eyes I'll make a blank layer then color pick a dark area near her eyes something like this dark red here then I'll paint over both of her eyes next I'm going to add a mask to that to clean up the edges and then remove just the center area of the iris and pupil and set that to hardlight and now we have this so now with our image done we can move into After Effects our job in here is very simple with our original footage in our comp we're going to throw in the image make sure that our head is at the very beginning then mask feather and position our face over the original shot just making a digital mask that we can then put on our actor and to do that we're going to hide this mask layer then create a null and track our original footage we'll select track motion then check position rotation and scale and set the boxes over our tape then track forward now just apply that to our null then unhide and pick whip The Mask layer to our null and we have this next up is a horror movie staple and an even simpler effect than the first one and that is the flickering light of course we have tons of lights out now that will do this effect for you but not with the kind of control we wanted to have and when you're running gun with little to no budget you might not have these lights or you might want to do it with existing lights in the building and make those flicker like we did with these overhead lights in the hallway so with the camera locked down we went down the hallway removing the bulbs one fixture at a time first starting with them all on then remove the bulbs from the first fixture then the second and so on getting a shot of each moment as we went now in post we'll take the shot with all the lights on and put that into our timeline then to make it flicker we'll grab one frame of the first light off and put it above that and with that we have a flicker already but to smooth it out and make it feel more realistic I'll copy that to be three in a row first clip I'll drop to about half opacity the second will be 100% And the third to half again so now we have it dim completely off and then dim again and now we can start copy and pasting these all over and rearrange them to give them more of a random feel and since we did each light on its own we can operate those independently but that's it a convincing flickering light if you want to see the full episode on how we did this just check the description below and before we jump into our last three including my favorite which we're saving for last let's thank today's sponsor which is Free Flow Free flow is a site that curates AI images and the prompts used to make them inside of mid Journey we've talked about mid Journey plenty of times on the show it's an app that allows you to create amazing images using only text prompts we've used that for backgrounds and such but I also use it a ton for Concepts and Pitch deck material but if you use something like mid Journey you know the hardest part is figuring out the right prompts to use to get certain looks or hit a high level of quality and that is what free flow is giving us with the best part of this being that it is completely free the idea is that they select these high-end commerciall looking images for you to use in your projects so you can find one of those like this insanely photo real image here then find the exact prompts that were used to get this end result usually mid Journey sites like this are not for images that you can use in actual design or commercial projects they tend to be mostly robots anime or too abstract but with free flow you can get these high-end images and their prompts to make your own variations and again for free so find something to download and use right away or grab the prompt to try this out for yourself head over to freef flow. or click the link in the notes and try this out because you know do it next up is one of my favorite blood comps we've done on the show and that was done completely in After Effects so first create a null and solid layer then link the solid to the null and mask out a shape from the solid something that would give us the shape of the throat wound then we'll key frame the rotation scale and position frame by frame to track with Josh's neck as best we can we could just use a Tracker but in this instance the footage is too dark for the tracker so manual is is next grab a gory texture and place it below the solid layer set it to Alpha matte and Link it to the null as well then change the color of the gore texture to match the scene and we have this for the neck so now we can add some blood and we grab some blood spray stock footage and place it over the cut linking that to the null as well and once again tweak the colors until they best match the scene finally we added in a few more layers of Blood using the same method masked around Josh and King Crow to make sure that the blood appears behind find any foreground objects and we're done it works this well because how it was shot it was darker and we're just getting some of that specular off the blood so we're able to put things sort of in Shadow while making it stand out because those little glints of light off the [Music] blood sticking with bloody effects but this time going all practical this comes from an episode where we tried out several practical blood and gore effects so check that out in the description below but with this one we were trying our hand at doing a Quinton Tarantino style bloody bullet hit and we went very DIY with it first we grabbed a hose and cut it down to the length we needed then cut a hole on one side where we wanted the blood to come out in the end and we made sure to plug up the top of the hose so that we were forcing that blood out through the new hole we created then we ran the hose up the back of Emily's shirt and then hid it inside of her hair which her hair hair is specifically what is making this approach work since we were able to easily hide the hose there after that we filled the bottom half of the hose with our fake blood and connected it to an air compressor which you can get from Amazon Home Depot or any other hardware store but with all that connected we fired on Q to get this bloody blast in glorious slow motion we also shot this with the sun behind her so the blood would be back lit to give us as much bloody detail as possible I pray that he will be with for the final and my favorite on the list we have an incredibly simple in camera Ghost [Music] effect to pull this off you'll need a projector which any projector will do and some see-through material you can get this projection material which would work much better but when we shot this it was sold out so we ended up getting this fabric that was similar and pretty cheap off of Amazon it took some testing to get the right light levels and background and something we learned quickly was that any wrinkles on the fabric became very pronounced in light and completely killed the effect but we just steamed those out and we're good to go once we had everything set we used double-sided tape to get the fabric on our wall set up the projector and connected that to our laptop where the footage of our ghost would be playing then we could play that on a loop while we lit our scene and we had to make sure not to let any light spill on the fabric at all or that would also completely kill the effect but that that's it you do need a projector and that can be pricey but if you already have one or need an excuse to get one there are so many uses for a projector in cinematography and effects we've done a bunch of episodes around projectors on the show before which we'll throw links to in the notes below but I love the idea behind this it's like an LED wall and pepper ghost had a baby that's five horror effects for your Halloween loving hearts links to all the full episodes are below and if you aren't a subscriber consider doing that and hit the Bell button so you're notified when we put up more content and until next time don't forget to write shoot edit [Music] repeat we see you later t

Channel: Film Riot

Views: 59,428

Keywords: film riot, triune films, ryan connolly, filmmaking, tutorial, how to, adobe, film school

Id: hgXJkRWpn34

Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 05 2023