Basic CLONE EFFECT INTERACTION - After Effects Tutorial

[Music] hey guys and welcome to a very delicious I mean exciting visual effects tutorial by now you should all know how to create that simple cloning effect but you can see all over YouTube if you do not know how that works I have a tutorial for that on my channel that you can check out and I will drop the link down below in this video we're going to look at how you can start to interact with your clones well one way of interacting anyway this type of indirect interaction is likely the easiest effect to achieve and while am I talk about more advanced stuff later on let's for now simply look at how you can steal some nachos from your clones using Adobe After Effects work flash drive fortunately then it's actually pretty easy to do and so this is going to be an upper beginner tutorial I will mainly assume that you are familiar with the basics of Adobe After Effects and that you do know all about masking and animating your masks but now before anyone has time to steal my nachos let's jump right into the tutorial hey welcome to the wonderful world of Adobe After Effects and we are going to start off with a brand new empty project let's first import the footage that we need to create this effect into our project and if you do want to follow along with this tutorial go to surfaced studio comm slash downloads and you'll be able to download all of these clips for yourself so you can just follow along and create your own thieving clones effect so let's import our footage leaving clones 1 2 & 3 into our project and let's grab thieving clones or 1 dot mp4 and drag it onto the new composition icon - well create a new composition this is the clip of the first of the three clones so it's essentially Walter sitting on the couch placing the nachos on the ground at this moment the second clone will steal as nacho back and so water just turns around turns back and essentially pretends like the nachos are no longer there now it is important that you film these clips in sequence because otherwise will not be able to probably pass that object along from clone to clone let's grab thieving clones or to dot mp4 and drag it into the composition place it at the very top and not surprising this is clone number two and if you rewind the nacho back is a sin she's still lying in the same spot where the first clone left it this however is a clip of the second clone stealing that nacho bag and placing it on the left side of the couch and then the third clone will steal that one again and the second clone pretends like it's no longer there so let's grab thieving clones oh three dot and before drop it into the composition and no surprise this is the clip of the third clone which if you want it a little bit starts out with the nacho bag still on the side of the couch where the second clone left it now the third clone comes in snatches it off there and gets to keep those nachos now a lot of people ask me how I time my cloning clips because obviously you're filming the same scene multiple times and everything needs to be time wise aligned otherwise this will not work now one way to do this is to simply count out the seconds quietly in your head as you're filming these clips a much easier way however is to fire up an audio recorder which you can even do on your phone and simply record yourself narrating this script for example I might record something like this Walter enters the screen and sits on the couch then he slowly looks at the nacho backs and places it on the ground second clones waiting then when you're recording your footage simply play this all you back somewhere off screen so that you getting cues on what to do when with your clones once you have all your clips and you've brought them into something like Adobe After Effects you now just need to stitch them together for that let's rewind our composition disable the visibility on thieving clones oh three so we just got clone layer one and two and let's draw a mask around this clone so we're kind of cutting him out and cutting a hole into this layer where the first clone can show through for that make sure thieving clones Oh two is selected grab the pen tool and let's come up and draw a mask around the left side of this clone I do not want to include this nacho bag here let's draw a big mask around this side and I'm going to include everything on the right because the third Patronus again is going to be over laying on top of the anyways let's close up this mask zoom back in and now if we scrub through we have the first clone come in and sit on the couch and I think it's getting cut off a little bit on the side here so you have to be careful with where you're placing your mass mum's going to bring this in a little bit also at the beginning I can see the shadow of the first clone being cut off down here at the bottom so what I probably want to do let's zoom in a little bit on that part let's just bring this mask in a little bit closer to his foot and I also want to kind of include this area and allow the shadow of the first clone to kind of fall across for that I might bring all of these masked points nice and close to the second clone kind of like that let's zoom back out and obviously that mask edge is way too harsh you can kind of see a dark edge over the couch and especially now here with the shadow along the feet so let's select our thieving clowns Oh to press mm to reveal the mask properties let's just give it a bit of feathering maybe 20 30 maybe even 40 pixels or something just make sure that you're not kind of bleeding away the foot because obviously you're softening out the edge of this mask and if you don't you close he's starting to kind of make him disappear so let's just make sure that looks all right and the shadows here it just looks a little nicer and softer so that looks okay let's check this out to see what that looks like with the first clone coming in yep cool so you can see his shadow falling across looks much more natural and interactive first clone sits down places the nacho back on the ground and right here the second clone needs to steal that natural back however right now his head just disappears because the mask isn't following his movement and she just gets cut off so for that we simply need to animate this mask path let's rewind a little bit and just after the first clone dropped off the notchback right here we have plenty of time to essentially cut this mask over to include the nacho back so that the second clone can then pick it up so maybe right about here when the first term pulls his arm back in so we're not accidentally cutting that off let's enable the stopwatch I can for the mask path let's go forward just a little bit maybe to right about here just before the clone starts moving his foot about there let's just click outside of this mask somewhere and let's drag the corners and expand this to essentially include the area of this nacho bag so we essentially kind of cut across from one to the other and also want to include the shadow because then the second clone can kind of pick this up in the shadow will follow along so we now essentially have this mask slowly fading across and right here you can kind of see the shadow of the first clone disappearing but it's not going to be all that noticeable because the transition is fairly slow and the first clone is actually moving about so curve looks believable so now the natural back essentially sneekly transitions over to be part of the second clone so let me select the layer so you can see what happens to the mask so the mask essentially slowly expands to include the nacho back that is part of the second clone footage and now the second clone can essentially just pick it up from there and place it on the edge of the couch let's scrub through the end make sure everything is okay and we're not cutting anything off with the masks that looks pretty cool now we just need to repeat the process for the third clone let's collapse all of our layers enable the visibility on our thieving clones oh three which obviously is the third clone and let's draw a mask around this one let's just come back a little bit to maybe about here where he's just about to steal the nacho back let's just draw a mask around him let's grab the pen tool make sure your thieving clones of three layer is selected that zoom out a little bit let's just draw a mask around his outline and I do want to include his foot down here but I don't include much of this carpeted area avoid cutting masks across really even errors like this carpeted area here shadow transitions will be quite obvious and you have a really nice edge here for the kitchen anyway so let's rather just draw this mask along the edge of the kitchen and maybe just up on the wall here it just it will just fit into the footage so much nicer let's close this mask that looks pretty good but we're cutting off the foot of the second clone so let's just expand this a little bit to make sure we're kind of getting a nice transition between these two feet cool that's not bad that's looking all right let's just make sure we obviously including all of the leg of the third clone and maybe just push this out just a little bit more include as much as you can without impacting the second cloud in this layer so that looks alright now to animate this mask let's just come to after the second clone places it on side of the couch and moves his hand away and now again we can sneakily transition this mask over to include this nacho back for that selected thieving clones oh 3 + mm to reveal the mask properties enable the stopwatch icon next to the mask path let's just move forward just before the clone is about to grab it maybe right about there and let's drag the mask over to include all of the nacho back so the 3rd clone can simply steal it and take it away so that transition again happens nice and slowly and sneakily I can still see a little bit of a light brightness transition here so again this just add a bit of feathering to this mask maybe 20 to 30 pixels just a little bit to make that transition nice and soft and then the third clone can steal it away let's describe to the end to make sure that looks all right let's also come down here make sure we're not having any issues with those feet right about there they're kind of blending just a little bit so let me just adjust a mask a little bit more so it kind of doesn't look too unnatural and before the third clones foot come in I might actually animate this mask back just to make sure the second clones foot is not impacted also it's going to drag this over to the side here so then it expands out and yes there's a little bit like a little bit of an overlay happening when the foot is going down right there so I'll just bring this in just a little bit more but it's going to be so - Kuehl nobody's going to notice to be honest and then foot goes away and I might actually move this mask again just back to the edge of the kitchen it'll still just work a little bit nicer cool that looks alright let's zoom back out collapse our let's rewind and play this back cool that's looking really nice now two things I quickly want to fix up let's select thieving clones Oh to press you to reveal all of the keyframes select the keyframes of this mask and press f9 to enable Bezier interpolation and let's make that movement of the mask a little bit less robotic and just fade and a little bit more smoothly let's also select clones layer or 3 press you again let's select all of the keyframes and press f9 for Bezier interpolation and let me just zoom in at the end here I did notice that there was a little bit of that natural back left so let's come to the last keyframe and make sure that the cursor is exactly on that last keyframe so hold down shift or press K to jump forward or J to jump backwards to the last keyframe so we're snapped onto that and select the layer it's going to bring this mask in just a little bit more because I can see it's just this is that corner of the nacho back left which I don't really want so let's just bring this out a little yep cool having that looks better let's zoom back out select all layers control a or command and a press you collapse them all finally I always recommend that you apply some color correction or color grading effects to all of the layers in your composition together what that does is similar to making a sandwich you can have lots of different layers but until you put them through a common process like a sandwich press or a toaster that binds those layers together it's just clearly the separate layers similar with visual effects works with all you the same way if you apply the same effect to all of the individual elements they all kind of feel like they belong together just a little bit better so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add some simple color grading and for that I'm going to create a new adjustment layer make sure the adjustment layer is at the very top of your composition and maybe I'll rename this as well to color grading and obviously you can apply whatever effect you want to this layer the one that I personally always like to use is the curves effect so let's grab that from the effects and presets panel and apply it to our color grading adjustment layer in the settings for the curves effect I just want to add a little bit of contrast so let's push up the top end of this curve and bring down the bottom end just to add a little bit more contrast and that's add a little of color as well so change the channel over to blue for example add a bit of blue into the dark area so I'm going to click in the middle of the curve to lock that down right there and just going to bring up the bottom end just to add a little bit of bluish tint into all dark areas in my footage let's switch over to read because it nicely contrasts with blue again click in the middle to lock it down and I'm just going to add a little of red into the highlight into the bright areas of my footage so just push that upper curve up a little you can see you know obviously overdo if you get a lot of red don't want to go quite that crazy just a little bit so it warms up the bright areas of my footage just a little bit and I'm finding it's getting a bit too red so let's switch this over to the green Channel again lock it down in the middle let's push a little of green into the highlights as well so it's more like a sunny day kind of feeling but quite contrast it's quite a poppy image so this is without the curves effect that is with the curves effect you know just a it adds a lot of style that personally I like but it also binds those three layers together a little bit more and so the transitions and the masks and all the blending that we're doing it's a little bit less obvious but now I'm really getting hungry for some nachos so let's rewind our composition and play back our final thieving clones effect [Music] [Applause] you know some people make this look elegant all I'm making is a mess and that's all there is to it if you enjoyed this video please hit that like button if you new here please hit that subscribe button and as always if you do have any comments questions or suggestions to sleep' them down in the section below but now thank you very much for watching and until next time I will see you later [Music]

Channel: Surfaced Studio

Views: 157,109

Keywords: clone effect, tutorial, adobe after effects, visual effects, interaction, advanced, multiple copies, how to create a clone, vfx, special effects, human clone, interact, pass object, film making, beginner, surfaced studio, Tobias, masking, keyframes, animate masks, basic, how to, instructions

Id: 2erSszXtrGk

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 29 2017