Cheap Tricks | Captain Marvel Energy Effects

[Music] hello my friends and welcome to our Captain Marvel edition of cheap tricks as of this recording I've only seen the trailer for Captain Marvel but based on everything that I've seen the movie uses the heck out of some energy effects I'm going to show you how to create some exact looks from the Captain Marvel film but I'm also going to give you a primer on all the effects and tools you need to create some fantastic energy effects for whatever project you're working on now if you want to use After Effects to create any kind of energy effect it's really important that you know these filters I'll be the first to tell you that fractal noise is probably the most powerful and versatile effect in after actual noise is probably the most powerful and versatile effect in After Effects what does that guy know and what is this are that 90s the new 80s of pop culture reference oh god I'm old freckle noise is in the central ingredient in creating organic patterns from scratch and after effects the fractals are never ending patterns they're simultaneously simple and also infinitely complex patterns that mathematically repeat over and over again all this is to say that there are kind of chaos that you can control when people look to harness the elemental forces and movies or shows we've long envisioned them looking like something kind of related to electricity or fire or smoke fractal noise looks a little bit like all that and fractals are the driving force behind a lot of the really cool effects that can create organic patterns and forms now many of you are probably totally familiar with all this and you can always feel free to use the table of contents below to navigate ahead but when I jump into my example shots I'm going to gloss over some of the more repetitive steps let's start with fractal noise I've got a new HD comp with a black solid you'll find the effect under noise fractal noise that right up top there are a variety of looks that might approximate something that you're kind of going for some look more like clouds some more like energy some swirly but what they all have in common is that they fill your solid with a very unique looking pattern which can be controlled by the brightness and contrast values then transformed scaled or offset and lastly almost most importantly it can respond to an evolution dial now as you can see as I rotate the evolution I get a wonderful transformation of all these values in a really organic way like check this out evolving some dynamic progressive noise with just a little bit of color correction and you've got a ground plane of lava a different color pallet and turning this on its head and you get a pretty cool sky now setting keyframes for the offset position and some for the evolution can give you this really pretty result so even with a bare minimum amount of love put into them the output is pretty amazing now flattening this back out we could try some different modes of noise maybe inverted with some thoughtful brightness and contrast applied we can create some more energy field kostik kind of stuff now you can use offset keyframes like we did with the sky but my preferred way to animate this fractal noise is with time expressions I can alt option click on the property I want and type in time times any value I like for some reason I will start out at like 150 and then adjust as needed you can even use time expressions for things like the offset value as long as you bracket it and use one value for X and one for y I'm actually gonna change my noise type to smeary and then kind of adjust the brightness and contrast again there we go now if I wanted to tint this baby bluish or something like that we've got the beginning of something pretty cool and then if we want we can add an additional effect to spruce this up even more a turbulent displace now turbulent displace obviously distorts your image but it's all on top of a fractal noise pattern and you can see that there are several similar options up front there's a few different types of displacement then the transform settings and then evolution options that's sort of the core info you get from any fractal driven plug-in now a nicely scaled turbulent displace can break up any monotony that starts to appear in your fractal noise and it can make things seem maybe more liquidy as the values are big and more crackly if your values are low you could even use multiple instances of turbulent displace perhaps even making the surface little crackly and then overlaying a larger Distortion in my experience it always looks better to use the small distortions first and then apply the larger ones afterward now I think at this point I'll mention a stylisation that pairs really well with fractal noise we've used it in cheap tricks before it's our good old friend vector blur now vector blur is actually a really cool tool it's supposed to be used as a control layer to influence and align directions of blurs but when you apply vector blur without a control layer the images own luminance is used to blur and smear the pixels either inward or outward this can give us a really cool pinching or a bubbling effect now it's just a stylization but it's totally worth knowing about and playing with back to our list our last featured fractal filter is rough and edges we've used it before but here in this context it's a little easier to see that the function of this is really similar to the other factor plugins it arose the edges of your alpha by overlaying various fractals of transparency now just like the other filters you have style options then the transform tools and lastly some evolution settings now let me do a small demo of how quickly even combine some of these filters to create a really cool energy effect let's start with a new comp we'll add a solid it'll call energy and here I'll draw a mask and create a relatively simple shape then I can add a few keyframes to create a basic animation so I've got this basic thing right here now pause on a frame in the middle like this and I'm gonna add roughing edges to this I'm gonna use the spiky version and then turn it up until I can start to see the borders of this thing making really cool shapes then I can add some fractal noise to this I'll just push and pull a few values until I get something kind of interesting next I'll add turbulent displace to add some cool bend and twist to the shape something like that and then I'll add an instance of vector blur turned up just a little bit to kind of pinch those values into sharper peaks CC toner is a quick way to choose a color scheme for this energy and then lastly I can add a glow to this energy or I can do the cry Marion special which is two instances of glow one narrow one wide and it's looking cooler already watch now this is kind of the bare minimum we can do and as you can see these filters are turning this boring old shape into this interesting one this means you barely have to put any effort into the initial shape to get a pretty cool output now let me pull on a background file to show you something fun we can do now right now the shape has some black values from the fractal noise so I can change the blending mode to add and I can see it nicely on top I could also try and unmultiplied really need the Alpha preserved now I'm happy with this little crackle of energy but if I go to the background layer I can add a displacement map until it to reference the energy layers effects and masks and then create a distortion effect that's based on that energy Ripple and now we've got an effect that's pretty cool now nearly every effect I do today will springboard off of some of these principles and the notion that it's best to get the simplest effects working in your favor all right everyone doing well great let's start with a Captain Marvel full-body look now every shot like this needs to start with some footage of your hero character use whatever resources you have available to shoot some footage of your friend in front of a keyable surface I had the help of an amazing crew in the UK who filmed this wonderful footage for me and just so you know it really helps if the newest member of your team happens to be a lightsaber wielding motion capture artist from the british academy of dramatic combat who already happens to have a Captain Marvel suit everyone meet Martha Spade thick red giants bloody brilliant a new community manager now I'll let you in on a little secret of mine I'm red green colorblind those two colors look a lot alike to me so I'm obviously in the right profession and while keying out blowing blonde hair in front of a green screen is really one of my favorite things to do it really helps when you have the right keying tools as well so I'm going to apply prymatt keyer which allows me to select the background color and then after that I can shuttle back and forth between the clean background and clean foreground options allowing me to visually paint away the sections of the green-screen that I don't and also draw in detail for the sections that I do as I work I can go down to the toggle in the comp window to switch to just the Alpha channel to see what my result is looking like and if there are any obvious spots that I might have missed under the correction tab I can select the shrink mat just a hair to choke away some of those floating points and then defocus my mat result a little bit also primate comes with this built-in spill killer which I can set to green and it can help me recover things like this green kind of reflected in the gold bits of her costume I'll go ahead and mat out this section of footage and then we're pretty much ready to go next for these shots I'll need some kind of spaceship the background so I purchased a 3d model of this sci-fi door from sketchfab made by CG wolf and then I lit and rendered in an After Effects using element 3d my simple goal here was just to create two still frames for you guys one pretty tame and then one with some bright under lighting now the cool thing about this is you can throw these two images the unlit and the lit layer on top of each other and then if I add a wiggle expression to the opacity of the lit one the result is this really lightweight backdrop with some interesting lighting going on so now we've got a source character and a background and I can finally start putting together my first shot procedurally now I'm creating this whole shot with an eye toward it becoming an easy-to-use template that you guys can pick up and start using pretty immediately so to do that I'm gonna try breaking down what captain Marvel's high-energy state looks like now I've only got a few shots to go off of from the trailer but I feel like I get the idea we've got those hot edge glows to do this I'll duplicate my source layer and then generate a fill inside the back copy a bright pale yellow color I'll set the blending mode to add and then I'll add some turbulent displace I can add a time expression to the evolution and so now as I play through you can see different bits of our outline kind of revealed as the displace pushes it one way or the other I'll adjust the size and amount until I'm getting just a nice bit of organic bleed here and there and adding a fast box blur at the end makes it more of a glow moving on let's create some of those hot bits of energy that kind of wrap around her edges on to her front side I'll duplicate my hot edge glow because it has a lot of properties I already like but I'll move it above the source layer I'll add a simple choker effect that I place up here above the turbulent this place if I choose a negative value it'll kind of bloat the image a little bit now I can apply the set map effect now by checking invert Matt and moving this up above my turbulent displace I've effectively punched out the center of this layer and created a warbled edge if I apply the rough and edges effect to this and choose the spiky edge type I can dial that up add an expression to their evolution and a few settings later I've got a really cool result now right now it looks kind of graphic or cartoony and this effect shouldn't really extend that far outside of her so if I apply a second set Matt effect it'll preserve only these interior heat lines I'll add an instance of vector blurred and turn it up slightly to give these more of a fluid feel and then I play with moving my turbulent displace a little lower in the stack so this energy sometimes gets to go a little outside the lines but not as far as before excellent now to create a simple bit of an inner glow or light wrap I'm going to use a really simple technique I'll create a yellow solid I'll add the set matte effect and then select that source layer for the Alpha Channel then I check the invert and matte box and add a fast box blur to these yellow pixels so they'll bleed over her a little bit then if I add a second set matte effect choosing the same source layer but this time I don't invert the matte the result is a really simple inner glow whose radius is determined by that fast box blur and I really like the way that helps soften the edges let's move on to the cold energy details I'll create another copy of my source layer and then I'll add the stylized find edges effect there's an option to invert which I'll check and then I can set my blending mode to add now if I use some CC toner I can colorize this a little bit more like electricity now what I'm ultimately interested in is turning these edges into some electric pulses that kind of move along her suits outlines I can turn these smoother looking lines into something that looks a little bit more like electricity by combining a couple instances of turbulent displace together but it looks really corny when it's totally filling in all of these lines and I have an idea of how to fix that let me turn off these modifiers for a second so you can see what I'm clearly doing I'm going to add a fractal noise effect right after my find edges effect if I crank up the contrast a bunch you'll get some nice black and white patches fractal noise has a blending mode setting at the very bottom which allows me to multiply these black patches over the find edges effect making it so you can only see the areas in the white now watch as I rotate the evolution value and you can see what appears to be glowing bits dancing along the edges of these outlines I can use a time expression to automate this evolution and then turn on my other effect again playing through this effect so load shows you that now I have something that looks a lot like electricity dancing along the contours of the image and no joke it might be really useful to use just this layers effects as a way to procedurally generate electricity on top of any kind of footage you wanted and get a pretty decent result moving on let's create some of that blue energy fill with a new solid layer I'll add some fractal noise choose dynamic progressive and then check invert I'll play with the brightness and contrast a bit and then I'll add an expression like always to the evolution I'd like to create the illusion of this noise having some puffed depth so it's not just a flat layer on top of her so I add an instance of CC glass and then select that original source layer and use its alpha to kind of puff up the center of her shape now below that I also have a set matte set to that same a source layer to clip it properly after that I'll actually duplicate my CC glass instance and switch the property to luminance if I turn down the values I can get some nice distortions around the contours of the original footage just for some more detail Cece toner helps me blew this up a bit then I'll use a similar trick to my electricity layer where I'll add some fractal noise that multiplies through this effect and they'll add some expressions to its evolution and then some to the offset which if I set like this makes the noise pattern drift upward over time I'll make sure my fractal noise is multiplying on top of the other effects and then I'll set the blending mode of this whole layer to add and I'll slightly adjust the brightness and contrast of the original fractal noise to about there and then just like before I'll add a vector blur just enough to make this energy look a little bit more like caustic webs of energy now playing through this all it's looking pretty awesome one issue that I've ignored so far are the bits of energy that are in front of her face but I have a nifty solve for that I'll create a new solid which I'll call face blocker and I'll create a little feathered mask where her faces now this layer can be set as a guide layer and it's opacity can be turned all the way down the reason I have it is because now I can select any layer in the foreground causing these issues and apply a set mat effect to them in the effect I can select the face blocker layer and choose masks then check invert matte now I can rename this effect face block mat so I remember what it is and then I can copy the effect select all the layers in the foreground and then paste it and now her face is preserved across all these layers and I have this handy top layer that allows me to select any area I don't want covered in energy and I can adjust the feather or finely-tuned that look as I need now before we go any further I've been doing all this stuff on top of the flat footage but it could use a little more zing I'll add a top adjustment layer and then add Magic Bullet Looks you've seen me use this before and especially with this flat footage you can get some truly incredible results really quickly once I'm back outside I'm going to add two glows one narrow and one wide so I get a nice bloom around the highlights after that I'm going to apply a couple of effects from red giant universe now I'll admit that I've always had a little bit of trouble remembering and finding some of the effects included with universe but the latest update has totally solved that problem for me simply go to window extensions or you can click on the red giant universe dashboard here you can quickly preview all of the many effects and presets within them right now I'm looking for some glow effects to match those glimmers from the trailer and there's an effect called glimmer right here clicking on it gives me some nice presets to choose from and get started I'll apply this Animorph one and then I can make some individual tweaks in my effects window next I can pull up that dashboard again and go to distort and then select maybe my favorite of all the universe filters heatwave I'll apply the billowed preset and I'll tweak a few settings and also go to the built-in mask options where I'll select an ellipse invert it and then use these two control points to make a nice area around the face where there's no heat Distortion now I like how this is looking so far and I skipped one of the exterior effects earlier I'll call them auras they probably have a name in the comics becky's or something but they basically look like little stripes of energy that flow off of Captain Marvel I'll duplicate my source layer and I'll use two effects to kind of create these little energy wisps first is a radial fast blur which will smear my image outward if I drag it down here it kind of looks like it's shooting upward and then I'll apply Colorama now Colorama takes the input of the original image and converts it to an output cycle of custom colors play around with it for just a little bit and you'll see exactly what I mean one of the most versatile effects this thing does is it allows you to repeat the output cycle meaning that you can create an even more complex color image based on what you feed it something wild like this for example now if I were to animate the phase shift I get colors that generally move in the direction of the intensity of the original image now just watch this to see what I mean kind of nice and flowy and combined with that radial fast blur it looks really cool kind of Aurora Borealis style to complete their look I'll use CC toner to color them like I have before and then I'll add an instance of CC glass and use the original images alpha channel to warp the shape of these auras adding a little bit of turbulent this place afterward makes them look even more varied I'll duplicate that and make a hot and a cold copy I'll add some time expressions and some variants so these two layers have a different resulting hot and cold set of wisps and they look pretty cool now I feel like some steam or smoke coming from the floor might be a nice little detail to add some more life to this comp so in a fresh comp use three instances of fractal noise combined with some rough and edges all kind of overlaying and warped to look like rising mist like I said man fractal noise awesome now throwing that in the background and tinting it looks pretty nifty in here now Captain Marvel looks to have some of these cool blue flurries coming off her fists they actually look a lot like this screensaver and are simple enough to replicate with trapcode particular which I love so much why don't I marry it I'm pre rendering a loopable video file of this effect and then bringing it in so I can scale and place it over her fists as far as tracking it's worth doing as few keyframes as you can get away with next let's look at the eyes now glowing eyes are relatively simple you'll need to track the location of your eyes or pupils and you could do that manually with a simple point tracker or you can try this way draw a loose mask around the face in the footage layer and then right-click on that mask and the timeline and say track mask over in the tracking window you can select face tracking detailed features now you can track forward from the start frame of your comp and it takes a little while but it usually does a pretty decent job it's basically creating an effect with the point information of all of these details of the face all this data does bloat your file size so it's worth deleting any of the extra keyframes you don't need by clicking there stopwatches off now I shuffle some things around and I won't go into too much detail here but effectively what I did next was use that tracking data to help position to know light factory lens flares I'm using a preset that I saved for Captain Marvel's eyes and then pick with the light location to the position of one of the pupils and I'm gonna duplicate the effect but modify the expression so that I have a right and left pupil being rendered by pressing the tilde key I can maximize my time line so I can see a little bit better and then quickly link the brightness and scale of these two lens flares together I'll press tilde again and things are back to normal yes I'd note the tilde key will maximize any panel you're working on in after-effects so I could maximize my comp to preview it for a second or my timeline when I'm working with a lot of expressions or whatever else you want and then just press tilde a second time to go back to your previous arrangement blah blah blah I scaled the lens flares to match the eye size and then add some keyframes for the eyes to start out really bright and then dim over time I'll even add some opacity fall-off for the layer itself right at the end just to smooth this fade a little bit I'll drag this eyes layer up above my global glow adjustment layer so they don't get too blown out then I'll add an additional black solid with another instance of no light factory with a really bright flare coming right off of her core that fades out over time on top of this all I can add another adjustment layer with universe camera shake I'll use the car mount preset and Dow down the values so I get just a little bit of camera Rumble throughout the shot I really like the way this turned out and I want to be able to save some of the work that we've done so after I finished this comp I went through with the pseudo effect maker to create one set of controls that can influence all of these layers below so basically here's how it works we've got one comp for your source your green-screen character then we've got two for this background included for you guys I'll recommend a dark background for this because the glows can get a little bit overwhelming if your background is bright and then here we've got comp three the resulting effect everything in here is labeled pretty clearly for what it does there are some hidden layers that are locked down here which you can unlock if you want to mess with but I would just leave them but right up top we've got the marvelous controls which include the speed which is basically how fast everything flows around we've got energy level which can be dialed all the way up to a hundred a little crazy and back down to zero we've got the glow opacity which is basically just the opacity of that top level glow then we've got scale scale will obviously affect all of the sizes of the fractal noises and patterns so let me do a bad example now this noise would look probably too small for a close-up so you can scale it up right here then you've got that face mask err which is the thing that blocks out the interior details so you can have like a clear face or something like that let me just reset everything really quickly below what's opened up already we have some advanced controls and other options got checkboxes for all the different types of energy that are being rendered so you could turn off the cold energy or the hot energy or have them both on but leave the auras off things like that and then out of the advanced controls we have individual controls to tone down the cold tone down the hot if you want and also to play with the Aras opacities and length now there's one more really cool feature that I like about this that I had some help from the creative Cal community coming up with now my source layer is going to be different than your source layer but if it contains a face what you can do is select it draw a mask around the face you can set it to none but if you run the face tracking in detailed feature mode automatically adds into captain Marvel's eyes I had some help from Oleg Pirogov to come up with the script that makes this work all of the eye settings are in this eyes layer and they basically come with some master controls for the scale brightness and one more feature I think you'll find helpful the right and left nudge the code here is trying to find that pupil position value from your face tracker that you run now that can end up a little bit off but I find that usually it's a pretty consistent value across them all and you can set some light keyframes to keep them right on the eyes and over in footage we've also got this fist flurry which you can bring in set to an additive mode I'd recommend using the pan behind to move its anchor point right down to here that way once you get a position that's easy to scale all right let's try our template out on this close-up here I've got up pre keyed and put it into my source comp I'm gonna jump to the background comp and I'm gonna maybe scale up this background a bit just so it's kind of a different type of thing back here there we go and let's go ahead and see what our effect turned out like interesting I'm gonna go ahead and add some keyframes to this face mask try to preserve her face a little bit her hair is crazy bright so I'm gonna go to the marvelous controls up here I'm going to see if I turn the energy down what happens here we go that looks kind of better and maybe I can turn down the hot opacity a bit too yeah that looks a little bit less extreme I'm also going to adjust the size so she's more of a close-up scale say around here I kind of like the size of those lightening bits I really feel like somewhere in here is actually a pretty cool look I'm gonna solo the eyes layer and my source layer then around my last frame I'm going to draw a mask on my source set it to none and then over here on the tracker I'm gonna use face tracking detailed features and run this backwards now check that out right as soon as it starts running those eyes start glowing now her face tilts pretty far down but it looks like it's tracking it pretty nicely just like last time I'm going to quickly press you to reveal all the keyframes on this layer it created a lot obviously I'm going to highlight and delete anything that isn't one of these pupils and I actually don't even need this mask anymore check it out we've got glowing eyes pretty automatically now right at the end I want her eyes to be a little bit brighter so let's turn the brightness up let's try adjusting the scale up a little bit yeah something like that then I'm gonna scroll back to the point where her eyes kind of transitioned from looking down to looking up and right around here I'm gonna set a keyframe for the brightness at zero it actually looks like the transition is right around here eyes down hit f9 to ease that keyframe look at that and I like it a lot I'm gonna go to full res and I'm gonna add some keyframes on my nudges I scrub through and add a few nudge keyframes just so everything seems perfectly aligned all the way through her look up now let's turn everything back on here for a pretty quick first pass of this shot I'm really liking it let's see what more we could do with it though her hair still seems a little bit too extreme so I'm gonna go to the advance glow controls and turn the threshold up a little bit then I'm gonna go to my lair with looks and I'm gonna edit that a little bit I feel like this curve could be making everything a little bit darker and routier especially since there are some glows on top of this let's see right around there no that's nice I like some of the detail that came back with that pass while I'm on this layer I'll also check on the heatwave by default it leaves an ellipse right at the kind of top center of screen but it could actually be lower in the case of this close up just to keep her face a little bit cleaner maybe I'll keyframe the energy up from the beginning to the end just to make a little more exciting let's see what happens if we enable the core null but move it out of frame just to create some streaks of light that flicker along you can even duplicate the null effect move on down here I might throw these down below the looks layer tapping eat twice reveals their expressions let's turn up how much they flicker whoo that's intense all right let's tone down those expressions just a little bit then I think it would be nice to go to my looks layer again and kind of up the vignette amount so I'll go edit choose the lens in yet choke that in a little bit yeah and now let's quickly scrub through a couple parts of this I think it's pretty great let's render it all right next up we got what I thought was one of the most eye-catching parts of the trailer seems to be her stopping an explosion with a force field and kind of feeling that energy to do this we're gonna create our own shockwave asset and then we're gonna comp it all together alright let's create a new composition add a solid then I'm gonna call over the neglected child of the trapcode family that would be Dow now instead of particles Dow actually creates a geometry if I add a new camera you can see that just like the other trap code plugins it's a 3d object that I can work with so up here we have a path generator it's automatically generating a circle which is the shape that I happen to need let me see I'll scale it down a bit something like that then I'll go to segment which has all the properties of this extruded end gone so I'm gonna increase the number of repetitions of this shape to a pretty high degree so it's nice and smooth looking I'm also going to increase the number of sides until it's looking pretty smooth as well that looks great now as you guys might have guessed there is a fractal displacement setting in here and I'm excited about it because as I turn up this value you can see the shape being distorted and it's being distorted in real 3d which is fantastic this is an actual object I can fly around so we'll play with about that much disturbance but we're going to really increase the frequency of this fractal until we have this nice tangled web now it doesn't look like much now but if I come down here to the shader options I can tell it to use a density shader I'm going to disable the ambient occlusion and I'm going to change the blending mode to add and now we're getting some kind of smokey interesting looking shapes now Dow can actually react to 3d lights so if I were to create a white point light and then I'll position it right in the center of everything let me switch to another angle so I can show you in dows lighting settings I'm gonna go to the light fall-off and choose smooth that means that as this light approaches it there's some actual lighting fall-off based on where the light is I'll turn up its intensity a bit and then I'll search with a sweet spot where this light is basically illuminating the front edge of this ring but you get some fall-off on the sides which is pretty cool now if I want I can go to my fractal displacement settings and add an expression for the evolution let's try time times 25 it's a pretty boiling 3d fractal shape and because I like its relationship to the light in here I'm actually going to add some position keyframes to the camera I'm gonna pull it way back until this is pretty small and then I'm gonna push it straight through my loop now this is kind of a strange way to have this shape grow over time but I kind of like it I'm going to turn this into an ease in keyframe and then reveal the velocity curve where I'll let it slow down a lot at the end and start off with kind of a bang now let me play this animation through neat I've got some of the basics for a fractal shockwave now I can do some fun things like increase the speed of this evolution move it to 50 and I could set some keyframes on the amplitude have it to start off like this and then as we get closer to camera if everything kind of spread out let's see what that looks like kind of nifty now just like with fractal noise you can add things like vector blur to this and start to get some pretty cool energy ripple shapes after playing with this comp a while I ended up duplicating my instances of Dow and doing some different things to them adding different amplitudes some different levels of vector blur and one just clean level on top i also animated my light to slowly pull away from it so it darkens over time and once again the animation is mostly created by this camera zooming straight into it let me play this back and one of the craziest things about this is that it's an actual 3d shape so using Dow to create an effect like this means you can use it in a variety of different angles and situations rendering this comp as an asset I was able to create a separate comp which duplicates that layer a bunch of times adding it over itself at slightly different timings and different scales at the end of that I get to render this really cool shockwave asset I can use so let's move into the shot I've got my new green screen clip I'm going to apply prymatt keyer and then select the background and try to restore some of the foreground details do the same process I've been doing before once I'm pretty happy with my key I go ahead and I draw a garbage matte around MARTA once this is feeling about right I bring in my kind of temp doesn't really matter background it's kind of a nice the image of a dirty old airplane kind of match the flight suit I'm gonna blur it slightly and it's only gonna be visible for a couple of frames the trailer and Marta's footage are actually wider than HD so I'm gonna bring in some black bars so I can kind of work with the anamorphic ratio this means I can scale Marta down in her comp since she doesn't need to go this low in the frame next I need a quick explosion so I'm turning to my friends at action VFX who have provided this amazing explosion it's got a pretty fantastic alpha Channel and it can go right into my comp a kind of size and position it here and try to retime everything so Marta's reacting to that explosion at the right time once that's in place I can bring in my pre-rendered shockwave I'll set the blending mode to add and then I'll scale it up and try to position it to work nicely in concert with that explosion adding some CC toner I can change it to a nice electric blue color then I can create an adjustment layer and place it below my fractal blast layer I'll add some brightness and contrast to this and as the explosion sets off I'll darken the background a lot they seem to do it in the trailer also as with all energy effects it's really nice ER to Comp them over a darker background than a bright background that's my main guess for why they're doing this same reason is hard to have a lightsaber fight out in the daylight already this is starting to look pretty cool I'm gonna grab everything except for my foreground layer and pre-compose them and call it the background this way I have a foreground and a background layer and if I want to use an effect like a color matcher I can reference the background and get all of that color information I'm gonna jump over to my background cough and copy out one of the fractal blast layers I'll paste it into my comp where I'll kind of arrange it like this and then draw a small mask this feathered mask gives me just this small little bit of energy and if I rotate and position it a little bit like this it look like some of that energy is wrapping around Marta as the explosion continues then I can duplicate that layer and kind of rotate it around and place it to her other side and maybe some above and below her arms just to feel like that energy is enveloping her as it expands next on a foreground layer I'll add some light rap I can select the background layer and then add a few key frames throughout just so you can see the explosion kind of impacting her layer and later on that energy because this blue Energy's on top of the kind of yellow reddish explosion it's getting a little bit purpley toward the end I suspect so I'm gonna add a top adjustment layer with color balance on it and turn down the red highlights a bit as the explosion happens I'm realizing now that I haven't done any color correction on my flat footage so I'm gonna jump into the keyed comp and apply color II stuff here I'll scroll down to the lookup table and choose Pro lost flat which looks pretty nice to me the background I chose is a little bit boring and it's nice of that LUT adds a lot more detail to her hair and clothes next to sweeten this a little bit I'm gonna add a black solid and throw on no light factory I'll pick a light with a pretty small profile hide a few little bits of it hidden all keyframed these small blooms one under her arm on this side I'll duplicate the effect then put another on the other side of her hip and that adds some nice to bloom on top of everything jumping into my background confit I'm gonna select one of the energy layers and pre compose it pre composing it will maintain its scale and position within that calm but it'll also allow me to do something else I'm creating a duplicate of this pre comp also called pre comp shockwave bump inside here I'm gonna create a solid a gray solid specifically exactly 50% gray I'll drag it under my shockwave and then when I come back to my background file I can throw that bump map to the very bottom and turn it off then on that adjustment layer in there I can add universe prism displacement and select the pre comp shockwave as my bump map this prism displacement is the same one I used in the wrinkle and time episode it's really nice and I really like the way the colors start to separate the more they get distorted playing around with the softness and distortion settings can give me some really cool results and I kind of like where this is landed I'm gonna go back to my light factory layer and I'm gonna add one more right up here next to the side of her face here I can select the foreground layer as an observation layer meaning that it'll actually obscure that lens flare in case any of her hair kind of blows in front of it a bit over in my background comp I'm gonna find that adjustment layer with the brightness and contrast and turn it down even more I feel like they go pretty extreme with the explosion in the movie jumping back it's looking pretty great a last little bit of detail I'll add a solid with particular I'll jump into the designer window and choose the explode emitter behavior I'll crank that up a bit until I have a handful of particles exploding off of it then in the particle type I'll select sprite and from the choose bright category I'm going to choose the glass bit sequence it's under dust and debris I'll have it choose a random still frame so they all look a little bit different and I'm gonna size these up just a little bit something like that back in the cop I'm gonna reposition my emitter and then slide that layer to down below my foreground I'll enable the motion blur on these particles and I'll also add a color matcher so they kind of blend in nicely with that explosion I add some universe camera shake and renoise ER to make everything feel a little bit more real and here's the final result check that door for heat then ah sorry that was the wrong sound cuz someone give me a hand I'm so sorry for that by now hopefully I've ruined the mystique of any shot that looked beautiful to you once but now you know is really just a bunch of soulless fractals I mean nothing in the shot should really be a mystery to you at this point so I'm gonna go over this very quickly I've got a cell pattern vector blurted turbulent displaced it and even multiplied this fractal noise over it then naturally I masked off little bits and pasted them all over my footage heck I'll even put the whole stinking card in there and camera blur it into some hexagons color corrected within an inch of its life and you know I'm putting some particles in there oh and did someone order a gradient ramp a duplicate of the hand with some fractal noise and CC glass tinted orange might pass as an interior glow and if you happen to find any edges while you're out there you can always tint them blue and wrinkle them up I'm being a little bit blunt on purpose I think these energy effects are actually turning out pretty darn well but it is my business to break this stuff down and sometimes something you might think is difficult as actually just a good old-fashioned recipe with some simple ingredients all right I hope you guys are having a blast if not out and don't worry I've got a cool template for you so confession time there's this site that gives away all these templates so when no one's looking I want to create the look of Captain Marvel's energy blasty thingies that's a photon blast okay a photon blast well there's one piece of green screen footage that I really wanted to make some use of so I improvised something that I thought would be cooler in the end but really I just wanted a passable background to test some of my lasers in front oh it's a photon blast whatever the cameras moving in this clip so we're gonna need to track the footage so this segment failed the initial camera track so I'm gonna feed the camera tracker a modified version of this footage I'll do a temporary key on my actor so I can erase her and then fill her in with green and then I'll boost the brightness and contrast of everything just to make sure there's some variants in the background I can even throw in an instance of Colorama and repeat the output cycle in cases where you have very little contrast in the background cycling the output phase can effectively create these more distinct shapes for the camera tracker to work with it's not an exact science but it worked really well in this instance now that we've got a key to character layer and a tracked camera I'm gonna do a really quick breakdown of the scene because the cop itself is not stellar but it did come together pretty quickly since there's effectively no depth in the camera solved it made it easy for me to just throw in this rocky background and have a track with the footage pretty well since it was a little bit boring like this I added an instance of CC slammed and set the base point way down here where she makes contact this allowed me to add some keyframes creating a low-rent subtle camera drift I have a handful of color correction things going on with my keyed footage but one cool filter I'd love to show you guys is the RG shadow effect it's really great for creating cast shadows from flat layers so you basically use these two points to establish a ground plane and this other one is the direction of the shadow and with just a few keyframes they have a nice kind of contact shadow going on with her and all of this only needs to look okay because I knew I was gonna use some ground fog to obscure the contact point and also add some more life to the scene I was gonna reach for some stock video of fog but then I thought I've been blabbing about how cool fractals are the whole time why not just make some so I created a solid full of fractal noise with some turbulent displace and then I masked it into this little shape here using the feather control point options on the mask which is something I just learned about last year this created a neat wispy shape I duplicated the noise layer and created a few different variations of it and then to make it more versatile I added a control layer up top with a wind direction when wind speed controls which I linked via expressions to all the fractal noise properties below setting the speed real low is great for wispy atmospherics and setting it higher can look more like steam coming off a pot or blowing sand or something either way it's really lightweight and fast and I'll make sure this templates available to you along with these other files for this particular comp I set my wind to be a little bit faster and kind of pointed it up and to the right then I made a dozen tinted copies all over my landscape I hit them with some comp lights to create a bit more depth and then keyed in some bright flicker to these foreground pieces just for that moment that I add in the photon blasts then I've got a 3d vignette to kind of darken the front corner of the comp here and a light blue gradient ramp that kind of goes across like this then I added some instances of no light factory just to JJ this up a little bit here and there and then right up top I had some adjustment layers with a trifecta of universe heatwave chromatic aberration and Magic Bullet Looks and it's it's fine it's fine this comp isn't my favorite it looks kind of like if you set an Evanescence video in the third act of Wonder Woman I haven't even seen Captain Marvel so I don't even know what this is supposed to be it's just a fine background plate for my laser template class this is the Captain Marvel photon blast template by default it features two blasts coming from these two origin nulls and heading out in the direction of these two Direction nulls there's a camera in this comp the cameras really helpful for getting different perspectives and kind of moving the blasts into the right position and scale but more specifically you can move the origin and direction those to help determine where the blasts are coming from and which direction they're headed out in now by default the template features these two armed blasts there are some hidden lights down here that are used as light emitters for these trap code layers if you want to just feature one blast at a time you can go to cannon number two turn its intensity to zero and switch it off and now you've got just one origin in one direction to play with now to make this effect to work I did have some keyframes in these layers below the one that controls things the very most are the keyframes on the trap code blasts for the particle amount it's set as a default to come in with 18 particles per second and then it switches off after a moment the easiest way to position this blast within your comp is just to grab these small layers and move them to the timing of where you want your laser blast to start then you can set the origin and direction as your shot dictates all right so let's try this with a shot I'm going to bring in that piece of footage we made earlier and drag it to the very bottom here perfect and we're done actually what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use this frame as a guide I'm gonna use the cameras properties to kind of come up with the right scale for these armed blasts before I start key framing my direction and origin nulls I like being right around here now I'm going to scrub through my footage to find the first spot where she's supposed to be firing right about here and I'm gonna drag these layers over just like that and let's move a little bit in so I can see the vector of these two armed blasts perfect if I reveal the position of all of these by pressing P I can add some keyframes now let's go ahead and position our origin nulls let's put them here and we'll put the direction nulls in a direction that it feels like the arm blaster kind of enlightment with them and next I just step through and kind of keyframe these origin points and these Direction vectors to look correct compared to her arms very few keyframes all things considered and let's play that through [Music] if I were gonna final this shot I'd probably add an adjustment layer with an instance of universe camera shake key framing the master amount to correlate with that photon blast I'd add some renoise er and I might even throw in some anamorphic bars and add a transform effect with some key framed position it's totally the film students pan and scan and hopefully if you've learned anything from today you know that you could do something like add some energy cuffs to transition from her arm into these laser blasts using something really simple like a few masks with some rough and edges maybe some radial fast blur and some vector blur to create these simple electrical transitions from her arms into the blasts man there's so much more that could be explored when it comes to these crazy fractals I honestly gave fractal noises shot for the first time 13 years ago after seeing this video by this guy now I can't imagine my life without it honestly just give yourself like ten minutes with these plug-ins and you'll probably impress yourself I'm gonna share a starter file with you that has a few of our fractal creations for inspiration and also a few pre-rendered elements like this shockwave and these tendrils and of course these marvelous templates a big thanks to our amazing hundred thousand YouTube subscribers we're gonna keep creating great tools and content right here so subscribe below if you haven't and always feel free to reach out to us on twitter at red giant news or me personally an action movie kid whenever you have questions or even better when you want to share something creative you've made tell you what just go film your son or daughter in front of the green screen and turn them into a super hero they'll love it and you'll be like the coolest parent around I mean the works done just just just download the thing it's right there you know you wanna

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 353,767

Keywords: Red giant, visual effects, vfx, motion graphics, filmmaking, color correction, compositing, tutorial, gaming, after effects, adobe, premiere pro, final cut pro, trapcode, magic bullet, universe, pluraleyes, particular, mir, movies, video, training, how to, diy, maker, iron man, ilm, vlog, blogger, content, youtube, creator, vlogger, vlogging, captain marvel, marvel, brie larson, captain marvel energy, captain marvel energy effects, mcu vfx, mcu

Id: d1nUfkmLGaY

Length: 60min 0sec (3600 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

really like the tutorial, can I try and show my friends?