Cheap Tricks | Frozen II VFX tutorial

and check this out it's not a visual effect in the same space for the first hello again my friends it's Hoshi your action movie dad here and we've got a pretty cool episode for you today for the first time in forever we're covering an animated movie now I haven't seen frozen 2 yet but a bunch of my very talented friends helped make it and let me say my family's always had a pretty healthy relationship with the game now animated movies are really hard to make I should know I made them for years but today we're simplifying these magical effects into something you can do at home based on some cool shots from the trailer I'm going to show you how to make this magical diamond explosion show you some tips on creating magical snowy spirals and how to venture into the unknown with this pretty portal I'm sending these up as free templates so you can get right to doing this yourselves or with your kids who love frozen for real your kids will love this stuff if you want to jump right ahead to the templates you can do that right here but it also love to share the process behind them with you to our first stop was Hollywood green screen studios to grab our live-action plates Marta aka Captain Marvel aka Daenerys is based in London but we actually managed to get her all the way back here to Los Angeles where I live today she'll become Queen Elsa with the help of the amazing Skye McDonald check her out on Instagram she's got amazing stuff we had a great shoot and got way more material than I could possibly be effects in time a very special thanks to Kevin from cast in Hollywood and also to Anthony and Sam for helping us film this material we filmed Marta on a green screen because I'm armed with prymatt kr6 and also this will give us the most freedom later now for these templates a keyed subject will give you the best results but if you don't have access to a keyable surface you can always just add some frosty magic on top and then there's always roto and masking this handful of clips are all the practical things that I need and then after that it's into the digital realm where modern animated movie magic is created and probably the majority of blockbuster movies as well so let's jump into After Effects and start with some magic swirls here are a few from the movie sometimes they're sparkles sometimes they're snowflakes and sometimes there are these magic smoke or ribbon like streaks and trapcode particular is the queen of particle generators also shame on you for assuming particular was a dude I'll play a particular to a solid and then create a point light named emitter in particular settings I can tell the emitter to be any light called emitter or any other name I choose if I animate this real quick you can see we get this cool spiral of particles the light emitters are great because I can also use the brightness of that light to affect the particles per second the intensity is basically acting as a percentage dial for whatever number you set in particular also I can duplicate light emitters change their paths and check that out now that we've got the rough system in place I'll head into the designer window where I can finish the look of these swirls in nearly real-time shopping through and designing your own particle look is super simple with this plugin there are some great walkthroughs of particular right here on this channel today I'm going to save out a handful of my favorite frozen inspired particular settings so you can throw in your own footage and start having fun right away for the shots that I'm doing today I've settled on these hero Glo sphere particles with some random size also some random color from this custom gradient then I've been able the auxilary particles these little darker blue ones that float around and I've also got a secondary system emitting some blue cloudlet particles they're a little bit bigger and they combine to make this kind of sparkly mist look now that we've got some of the particles doing a bit of sparkling on their own there are some easy things we can do to make them even more magical even though I don't use it every day star glow is sometimes the perfect plugin for things like this now playing with the settings for just a few seconds or even reaching into the one of the many presets we could dial this into some amazing animated glitter Sheen you know what I like to call him his star glows now let's use this to mimic one of those shots from the trailer watching this reference clip I see maybe for Hiro swirls so I'm gonna make four copies of my lights add some Z translation to their paths and use each lights brightness to control how much is emitted from each and check out this bad girl to complete the look of the portal I pre-rendered a smoke cloud in particular that I can duplicate a handful of times quickly and place all around my scene all this goes in front of a free image from pics here which I tinted and darkened a lot last all we need is our Marta footage while key here using Prime at 6 which just knocks out the background of the few clicks I'll also run color East has guided color correction to make my log see footage look a lot better now I can place her here behind a few of the foreground smoke layers and add a feathered mask so her legs kind of disappear down here it looks pretty good I just need her to disappear into the portal when she gets to a certain point I'll start with just animating some mad chokers with a ton of iterations keyed to kind of erode her away now if I sandwich my eroding character between a handful of fluid dynamics particles that I created I can get this really cool mist effect flow dynamics is this really exciting part of the most recent particular and if you want to learn more about them check out our getting started video and also the part 2 of my cheap tricks on Aquaman all these layers get thrown into Super Comp which I'm kind of addicted to now because it takes these kind of layers and turns them into something like this as a last touch I add some CC vignette and some universe spot ler which I often throw in make a large ellipse out of and then invert it to give me some cool edge blur you can do this with your own mat and a compound blur but this is faster and that's shot one four shot - I'm gonna mimic this diamond explosion and here are my ingredients we've got a background Elsa the ice shelf she's standing on some simple hand sparkles of the head and then these diamonds for that background I'm just grabbing another pics here image and photoshopping it's in tinting it and justing yet into something that more closely resembles the background from that movie and this reflection is a little bit too sharp and has a different kind of scale than the shot in the movie so in after-effects I'm gonna use a VFX reflection to recreate that part of the image with a much softer reflection next I'll prep Marta by cropping myself out of this footage and drawing a little green mat around her dress contact point then like before I'll run prymatt and then color ISTA now we've filled all these clips at 60 frames per second so when I add them to a 24 frame per second comp the motions a little bit sharp so I'll add in some pixel motion blur to help blend things together next we need this ice rock so I jumped over to sketchfab and downloaded fantasy rock by Johnny 10 now do you folks remember mere we used it to create these curtains and this water surface and the shock wave well what you may not know is that I can select an obj model as the base geometry I can import that rock I just downloaded and then position and scale it in 3d if I import the texture that came with it as a layer I can then point to that layer under the texture setting for now this gives me enough information to block out my camera it's a simple snap pulled back kind of fast at first and then really eases in at the end all adjust the curves would look kind of like that now this rocks a bit of a fixer-upper so to get it looking better I'll change the object's base color to a kind of blue and then with a combination of lights and also some color correction to the texture map itself I can mimic that icy look from the shelf in the movie and now that you've seen me use mirror as a 3d generator I can do the same with this custom obj model I built in cinema now I haven't seen the movie yet but I'm assuming these are the souls of every Sims character you ever murdered you monsters and just like before I'll import it with mirror and create a little looping sprite I was pretty sure I was gonna use trapcode form for this and it was relatively easy to just jump in create a spherical array and use those sprites as particles and turn up the disperse but then I remembered I really wanted to use an obscure Asian layer to put some of these diamonds into the background and summon to the foreground and at the moment particular has really got that functionality so I'll actually scrap this and I'll switch to particular I'll make it a little burst of particles and then I can keyframe the physics time factor from 1 to 0 to kind of freeze the scene once the particles get to a certain point as the particles I'll select that diamond sprite fest for the numbers and timing and tell him back to having a healthy number of diamonds in the sky under the visibility section I can add a few key frames to the near start fade and the near vanish to make these particles kind of appear from back to front along with the camera movement next I do a little pre comping putting Elsa and the rock into their own composition along with a copy of the camera so they become their own 2d layer over here now I'll do a trick that I use sometimes when I want my particular particles to interact with a footage layer which is to create a 3d duplicate of a 2d layer to use as the particular obscuration layer if your camera static this is super simple you just create a duplicate that's 3d but since there's a camera move in my shot I've got a scale up my 3d observation layer to counter that camera pulling back to do that I'll mimic the placement of my cameras keyframes and then manually scale up the image at the end matching the velocity curved with the cameras as well now I can hide this layer so my MARTA layer comes clean 1 2 1 from the 2d layer but the 3d obscuration layer is allowing some of the diamonds to be behind her and some to be in front then later if I want to mess with a particular system it's just one layer to deal with I used this same technique a lot for these shots and MARY POPPINS returns in the original shot these diamonds kind of appear almost with like an iris wipe along with this other kind of cloudy burst so I'll create something like that again using particular smoke lit particles with some blue shadow lifts and some trailing auxilary particles she's also got that magic coming off of her hands so for that I'll create a new little system of light emitters that I can just keyframe along with her hands and then at a particular layer with really the most basic of sparkly glow particles coming from them pretty cool now as you may remember I'm colorblind and at some point along the way our Rabinowitz asked if I'd ever considered making the blue dress into more purple using color ISTA and I didn't know how to do that so he sent me this video what you do is just gonna go into the hue saturation and lightness area and all you got to do is grab hold of the blue nope in there and move it towards purple and if you wanted to saturate it more you could pull this out right if you wanted to make the dress lighter or darker you know you could make it a dark purple you could make it a lighter purple oh yeah that's it hope that helps and now you all know how to do that as well you also now know that the spoke are in rabinowitz micro toriel's are just one of my many favorite things well that folks I may sound like a broken record but now that I've got all these great layers I bet they'd look really good if I threw them in a Supercop where I can add in some diffusion and some glows and haze to each layer mimicking that original shot now in the final because our live-action footage had this pretty strong rim we decided to add in this full moon back here and also use a VFX shadow to just put this little cast shadow right back here now here's a quick before and after and there you have it - great frozen shots without my computer freezing up once now in my work here and elsewhere I use a lot of red giant plugins now just because I'm making tutorials for them but really because they save me a lot of time I mean just today I used magic bullet and trap code universe and the VFX suite and in the past that might have felt overwhelming but now you can just subscribe to red giant complete where all of these are included it's another certainly good deal if you haven't heard of it yet go listen to these distractingly beautiful humans talk about it on red giant comm and now it's sharing time as I mentioned earlier I simplify these two shots into some templates you can use each of them do come with a hundred percent AE version and a version that's a little bit more interactive that uses red giant complete first we've got the frozen scenes template which when you first open up there's a character comp for each scene in here you can place your footage of your actor doing the action described or you know something else if you want key out your character here and then place them roughly around these guides then hop over to the RG or the AE version and you're probably pretty much there in the frozen particles templates I've saved all of my particle setups so if you've got trapcode particular you can just download the template and be able to do all this these templates use light emitters allowing you to animate the lights to wherever you want the particles to be the brightness of the lights works as a percentage dial of the particle count the color of the light can change your particles to different colors if you want and also you can duplicate these light emitters and then have multiple emitters sometimes I find that parenting a light emitter to an O is actually a really good way to have a handle on translating them around and if you're working in a relatively flat scene you could actually motion sketch or record a cool motion using a 2d know then switch it to 3d and parent your light emitter to that now because these are light layers be aware of how they may affect your 3d layers if that's how you built your scene you can always turn the light layers off if they're adversely affecting things and it'll still function as an emitter for particular or you could add like 100% ambient light and then see if they happen to create a cool look for you now with any one of these you can import your own keyed footage place it as a 3d card and then set it as the obscuration layer in particular and now your particles can do things like this if you don't have trapcode particular or you're putting these together somewhere else don't worry I have pre-rendered a handful of these simple particle animations so you can use them any way you like and whatever software you like I've also rendered out a sprite of that rotating diamond thing as an additional resource it's worth checking out action 2v effects where you can combine your particles with some of their free spell hits or their blood mists if you tint them white or their dust waves to create some really great looks and also it's really worth having a look at all the new stuff they have on there so now that you've seen how fun and easy these particle effects can be play around with it tag us and anything cool that you've made online we love seeing what our creators are up to now as some of you know I spent nearly a decade working on animated films it was an incredibly humbling experience I have all of my animation mentors to thank for my appreciation for every part of an animated movie no matter of the media by their very nature animated films have to be generated entirely from scratch literally every single piece of the movie has to be designed by someone and it's not computers making these films it's people humans artists and engineers because software and industry standards are always evolving you rarely even get to a used recycled computer assets in sequels you can't just grab something from an old movie and throw it into a new one without a lot of additional artistry engineering and work production designers art directors and dozens of artists helped lay the groundwork for us mimicking these shots here today so always be sure to give these creators their due and on behalf of cheap tricks continue to thank you to all of the artists out there making great is keeping each other inspired is one of the most important things we can do well thank you let go make something [Music]

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 503,618

Keywords: Red giant, visual effects, vfx, motion graphics, filmmaking, color correction, compositing, tutorial, after effects, adobe, premiere pro, final cut pro, trapcode, magic bullet, universe, pluraleyes, particular, mir, movies, video, training, ilm, vlog, blogger, content, youtube, creator, mograph, software, plugin, postproduction, post production, frozen, frozen II, frozen 2, frozen 2 vfx, making of frozen, making of frozen 2

Id: M78pkQNeBbo

Length: 17min 28sec (1048 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 05 2019