Cheap Tricks | How To Cast Firebolt In After Effects - Game of Thrones VFX Part 1

[Music] hey everyone Hoshi here and over the next little while I'm gonna be releasing a series of tutorials inspired by Game of Thrones nice sounds awesome do you think you're gonna have it done before the show is done so you know what people are still watching now I'll do my best to not blatantly spoil stuff but we're obviously gonna be visually exploring elements that take place throughout the run of the show and whether you love the series or it wasn't your cup of tea you have to marvel at how impressive it is the TV show and it's visual effects tackled dragons and battles and hordes of undead zombies battling on a frozen lake being attacked by dragons I mean Game of Thrones was an ambitious show who's later seasons delivered some of the best visual explorations of classical fantasy tropes we've ever seen on screen watching the show from a visual effects standpoint is a great overview of small and scrappy effects all the way to full-on technical wizardry combined with a thoughtful consideration to practical elements we're covering a lot of ground as always so this time I'm breaking up the tutorial into four separate more digestible videos so stay tuned subscribe and we'll cover all of this stuff in the weeks to come as you may know red giant has just released a VFX suite a great collection of helpful tools which I'm going to be employing a lot throughout the next few installments now this isn't just because I was asked to I'm a lazy man by Nature and I fear change so I'm gonna show you how I use the VFX suite primarily to save myself time and also access tools right inside After Effects that are so fast and helpful I really can't imagine not using them now now there's lots of information on these tools individually right here on the channel so if any of them piqued your interest please check them out as we get into this song of fire and I said probably be great to have some fire and/or ice so I'd love to tell you guys about another invaluable resource I use and puttin together these episodes action VFX action VFX is a massive online resource for stock footage ranging from fire and explosions to snow and dust ground cracks and simulations all very quickly browsable and very affordable I'd like you guys to meet a few of my friends so I have like this $30,000 camera just under this burning ceiling just waiting for it to collapse hey everyone my name is Rudolph Pio lui and I'm the founder and CEO and my name is Luke Thompson and I'm the chief operating officer we blow things up and help you put them in your movies in 2011 back when I was in college that was when that I was selling stuff online obviously nothing as crazy as what action GFX is doing now did one shoot in Chicago that was the first official action the effect she did I really do that well honestly it's like to put it lightly and it was just one of those things where we quickly if we wanna keep this project going and do it as well as you want to do it for the users then we're going to have to raise a lot more money and actually we do a lot of these effects and so that's when we did the Kickstarter back in the end of 2015 which ended up being like a huge success for like 400 backers which were mostly just VFX artists and stuff that really saw the need of what we're trying to do as far as creating this we think oh man shooting explosions all the time that much just be super fun and it is super fun but like it's still work and we still want to make sure that like everything's going well it's like I always say that my favorite assets and my favorite assets to film or two very different things because it's like something they come on it's great but when you think of filming it it's just men this was the most stressful thing in the world doing our best to push the envelope because you know like obviously we want really high quality effects but we also really want their quantity you know to be that place that literally would have everything you can think of so we live off people's suggestions because essentially we wanna do something that the VFX community actually wants so we're very receptive to that honestly the red giant tools that we've been able to incorporate in our pipelines them have been a huge lifesaver as well so they've we work really well together that is for sure now if you're a visual effects compositor or even an editor you'll likely find exactly what you need pre keyed and ready to drop into your film or commercial or game the stuff is really beautiful and we were super happy to partner with these guys for this video for all of these effect shots we needed some awesome live-action plates so we teamed up with some dangerously talented fight performers trained by Ronan trainer from the UK's independent drama thank you to them mouki international and our very own marta spade deck for putting in some crazy hard work for this footage some of which we're gonna share with you my friends let's start with little magic I've got a few pieces of lovely green screen footage here of a sorceress using some magic to conjure a fireball and one thing that's pretty important to discuss when you're shooting on a green screen is the lighting setup it's important to have your practical elements representing what you think the lighting will resemble in the final comp for this we tried dangling a shielded light bulb in front of her face for this shot but it didn't exactly work out so instead we flickered some other light in front of her for some interactive light from this fireball in this wide shot we knew she'd be mostly silhouetted by flames so we've got a strong backlight going on the first important step here and in all of our subsequent videos is keying out our actors and this job has made even easier by our latest installment of prymatt keyer once I apply Prime at I usually start by trying the auto button Auto does a pretty great job of guessing what color you're trying to key and giving you a great result on the first try if it doesn't work you can always manually sample your background either way after this I always suggest soloing your footage and changing the Compu to alpha right here switching to this view allows me to see what little bits of my screen are left over or what little bits of my subject might be missing one of my new favorite features in prime at six is down here called core mat a lot of the time in green screen work I do a key which gives me a pretty great edge but then it has little holes inside the character sometimes trying to refine those holes sacrifices your edge quality so the workaround that many of us use is creating a duplicate of your keyed layer and then using a combination of chokers to preserve the solid interior of a subject you can then combine these mats to get a better key so we thought why not just save the hassle and create a checkbox which halves the core matte shape right into your alpha result there are some refinement tools right below to assist with whatever scale your subject is time saved I'm going to be using that technique lots through this series so enjoy now this lady ought to be out in the woods or something so I've grabbed this free image from I'm gonna say pics here by Mac oh machine now I could probably just use the still image but to liven it up a bit I'm going to do some multi planning in after-effects multi planning or two and a half D whatever you want to call it is the process of taking a photograph and simulating depth via a camera move now when you're doing this kind of work Photoshop and its content-aware tools have made this process a lot easier over the years but for now I'm just gonna do something really quick and dirty so first I got to prep my layers so I'll mask out this foreground tree then maybe use the extract effect to isolate some of these darker branches to add back next on another layer I'll clone stamp out the foreground tree and then start masking out the mid-ground then on the far background and clone out all of this foreground stuff and I'm left with 3 layers which I can render out as PNG s with alpha channels in a new cop it's easy to convert these layers to 3d layers pushing the background back pulling the foreground forward and doing a trick that I've mentioned before of adjusting the anchor point to like here and then effectively folding that layer so we get a bit of Z depth out of this part right here now the Alpha Channel here kind of gives the effect away so I'm gonna mask out the top of that layer so now that's setup I have a 3d ish background which I can add a subtle bit of movement to the camera to also now that I've cut out some of these tree elements I can rearrange the layers and create different kind of background looks just for some a shot variety out of one photo so let's combine one of these backgrounds with my medium close-up of our lady casting her fire spell or whatever now here's a preview of those two layers together so you can kind of see that the camera movements subtle enough it doesn't really betray that that green screen shot is static now obviously I haven't done any kind of integration between these two elements so it looks bad but I want to lay out everything in the shot before I start blindly color correcting along the way now it's time to start adding some delightful assets from action VFX now as a reminder they have a collection of free stuff that you could get started with right now everything on their site is organized by type of asset there's also a whole category called atmosphere which I'm going to use a lot over this series for example there's some great hovering fog that might look great in the background of that comp so I'll bring it in set it as a 3d layer and throw it into the scene I'll switch to the screen blending mode so I can see it on top of the background and now I can see I've got some weird intersection issues as I bring this fog layer in they quickly betray any illusion my 3d layers we're kind of getting so I'll make sure that my layer stack down here is an order from background to foreground elements and then I can pop in an adjustment layer behind my fog to force the fog in front of everything below it and out of habit I'm also adding an adjustment layer on top - which would shield it any foreground elements happen to be rotated back into its space think of this adjustment layer sandwich is a way to force that layer to stay in front of these elements and behind these ones now instead of sticking with a screen blending mode I'll actually set my layer back to normal and then apply the set mat effect using this layers own luminance as a mat and this is called unmalted in my day but apparently unmold has being phased out in any case this is helpful because fog and smoke dune always necessarily brighten the background sometimes comping with smoke and fire are using only the additive blending modes can make a whole comp too bright or washed out with the set matte effect I can add a fill color to fill those pixels with like a slightly grayish blue color so they match this set better or I could have tinted it as well so as you can see it's almost nice to add in some practical elements when possible to create a magic fireball I want to mix some practical elements with some particle effects I'm going to start with a particle effects because I think that they'll be a little bit more customizable let's start with a new solid then I'll apply an instance of particular I really love some of the effects the fluid dynamic system can produce so I'm going to start with a very basic setup for emitter type I'll select fear shrink the radius down a bit next I'll go over to color where I can select one of the preset blocks called fire and then I can go over to my physics block and select fluid and we've already got something that looks kind of neat let's apply this setting for now and next let's animate the origin of these particles I'll create a new null and then I'm going to use one of my favorite old features of After Effects motion sketch in case you don't know about it or haven't thought about motion sketch in a very long time what it basically does is allow you to record yourself dragging a layer around the screen and it saves that data as a motion path I know I want this fiery thing to kind of hover around in a little swirly motion and then shoot out a frame like this so there we go I can press P to reveal those position keyframes and then down here on the timeline I'll use an expression to link my particular emitters position to that null now if I play through I can see some pretty good stuff happening here but the whole thing's little misaligned since I was motion sketching without a preview no problem though if I select all of my keyframes I can now go select one of them and transform the whole path until that's where I want it to be also while all these keys are selected I can hold down alt or option and then click on the first or last keyframe and then drag it one way or the other to squeeze the keyframes together I'll do it in this case to make it so the fireball exits a little bit earlier now something you want to be aware of when you're squeezing or stretching out keyframes is that now these keyframes exist at fractions of frames instead of exact frame numbers so something just to be aware of in case you get a weird error of two keyframes that seem like they're less than a frame apart let's focus on this moment where she casts the fire forward I know the emitter leaves screen but I would also love if there are a way to have these other hanging particles be affected too and luckily with fluid dynamics this is all possible remember those vortex rings they look really cool I talked about a Minocqua man one of the cool things I can do is jump into particular add a new system that is admitting zero particles but simply contains a vortex ring which will affect any of the particles within its radius I can point this ring emitter towards screen left and then add some keyframes to its strength to get something like this so check it out that's basically what I was going for and just as I've said in previous episodes particle systems are one of those things that you mess with preview mess with again preview again until you like where they end up by modifying and fine-tuning some of the physics settings I wind up in a shape that I really like so I can start seeing some better integration I'm gonna take a little moment to row to this foreground hand and sleeve now I wouldn't always do it this way but since her hand shape stays pretty similar throughout I'm gonna use a single mask and adjust it throughout I'm in a pre render my particular layer because I think I'm gonna use a copy of it as a mat of sorts one action VFX I found this great footage of some fire it looks like it's about the right size so I'll bring that into After Effects and find a placement that has some good bits of flame right in the location of that magic fireball appearing now if I were to just mask this in the circle area even if I feathered it I would get these really bad faded out edges which don't look very convincing so I'm gonna go with a matte that I create using the render of my particular layer here's how I'll sell this rendered layer for a moment and then I'll add a bit of fast blur and then crank up the curves now I have a much broader area that's still informed by the shape of those particular particles then I can extract the dark edges so I have a proper alpha on my layer if I apply this as an alpha matte to that original piece of fire footage you can see it's kind of a dynamic blob now now let me solo the matte layer again because I'm going to use some very similar techniques to what we learned in our Captain Marvel episode where I take this basic flat edge and then I apply roughen edges I'll set the type to spiky and then play with the settings to make the edge look more like flame if I switch to the alpha view you can see the shape alone very much like some of our tests in the Captain Marvel episode I'll add a time-based expression to the noise offset to be upward and a little bit to the left over time and I'll add another time expression to the evolution for even more life now if I reveal that matted layer you can see the footage of the flame is being matted in a way that the original top edge of the flame is totally preserved but these outer edges have more of a fractal approximation way better than a feathered mask and also more driven by expressions and effects than any key framing or masking I can do a little bit more work on the edge sharpness and positioning of the stock flames and end result is very pretty I go through and add a few more of the fireball assets from action of the effect to this moment where she cast the flame forward doing a little masking and adjustment here and there I'll also add an instance of no light factory to give the fireball a little bit of pop now because I know that this actor is going to be lit by fire in the front and I guess by moonlight or something in the back I know there's gonna be some color disparity between the front half of her on the back half so I'm going to pre-comp her layer and add a few adjustment layers one's gonna be this mask that kind of blue graze her out in the back a bit one is going to be just a little mask to darken the bottom of her costume right here it's a little bit of bright because of our practical light and then the third is gonna be an adjustment layer that I use that mask from my already wrote out hand to kind of take a little bit of the edge off of the highlight of this front hand then I'll futz with all these settings until I like how all of these pieces are animating together no I didn't say they look good together yet they're all just competent individual elements got a pretty great multi plane foggy background nicely keyed lady which and some pretty cool bits of fiery goodness but now that I've got this very basic set up we need a hero and look but what does it do Super Comp is a plugin that takes your layers and makes them look good together there are some great overview videos on this channel all about the specifics but today and over the next few episodes you guys can see a case study of how I use Super Comp one of the first things I'm going to do is reduce this comp to just a few simple elements the background and the source risks are just fine right now and aside from the lens flare I'm going to throw all this fiery stuff together so I'm just dealing with one layer called fiery stuff now I'm ready to activate super calm I'll select these four layers and then go to rgv effects Super Comp and you'll see this pop up appear as well as a new solid at the very top of your comp called Super Comp super comp is exporting everything to this single layer right now in fact you can see that if I go down here and turn off the other layers everything is fine because all of them are being referenced by the super comp effect taking a quick look at our Super Comp window it's basically like a mini compositor it has the four layers that we added to it our null fiery stuff sorceress and background all in a nice layer stack like this now this window can hover or you could go ahead and dock it just like this whatever is best for your workspace now you can see the layer stack represented right here with intuitive buttons to turn each layer on and off if I click on any of the layers you can see them so load in the super comp preview window and if I click up here on the super comp block itself it'll preview the whole thing now why use super comp well check this out there's this handy radial menu that has all of the most common effects that you had already used for compositing like light wraps and layer glows edge erosion and edge blending kind of effects all of them are built right in and easy to access let's start with the background it's too bright right now and so really quickly from the radial menu I can select color correction this is basically the mini version of the interface from color II stuff which is amazing so really quickly I could jump in here and do something like turn the exposure down or adjust or tint any of the white points things like that everything you'd want to do to color correct a layer alright let's move on to our second layer also to bright now one handy feature in here is that we could copy and paste any effect we like just like this now obviously the killed exposure wasn't the right effect for this layer so I'm gonna bring that back up but I'll mess around with some of the other levels and see where I end up and you know something like this is already looking a lot better the whole comp but that's just color correction everybody does that let me show you some other cool stuff right now our sorceress is her own colors and the background is its own colors there's no real interaction between the two and we need a little bit more integration so I'm going to go back to that radial menu and check out this effect called haze now at first it's pretty subtle which is great all of these default values are a good amount of settle because you can crank them up but honestly after the honeymoon period you're really gonna start wanting to scale all these back to closer to default values anyway so haze let me turn this all the way up to a hundred percent and show you what it's doing kind of like a light wrap in normal mode it's taking the whole background and blurring that color through the layer haze has this cool property called shadow amount and shadow basically kind of darkens the interior a bit but leaves the edges a little bit brighter it's still a very very broad kind of light wrap and of course you would never apply it at a hundred percent so let me show you what happens if this were turned down to something like twenty-five if you look out here at her hand or the back of her costume you can see that the color of the background is bleeding through her level in a way that kind of hands one over to the other just pretty amazing I'm going to tweak my color correction a little bit it's really easy to do right here and then I'm gonna do something about how sharp things like her hand right here are I'm going to add an edge blend now edge blend comes in appropriately subtly this is the white preview mask over here shows what area we're gonna blend pixels together it's the edge of her alpha now if I crank this up you can see more obviously that it's blurring all the pixels right at the edge of her blurring together the background and foreground colors so overall looking better already let me show you a quick example of some of the things that super cop is doing that you may not realize right now if I were to dive down into my background and play with a color correction a little bit as I brighten the background you can see that the color of that haze wrapping around her is changing if I darken it all the way down there's nothing really to wrap and if I over expose it you can see that she's getting over cranked because of that background - now something that would feature more prominently if the background were bright like this is a light wrap which of course is accessible right here I can add a light wrap I'll turn up the amount to hide just so you guys can all see it as you can check out in the preview window it's showing just the effect of the light wrap on her layer and over in our actual comp window you can see the whole comp together now it's fun about this is I can go right back to my background layer I've just the color correction back down to about where it was and this should look pretty great alright enough about her what about this fire up here now fire and glowing elements are one of the things I had the most fun with in Supercop I'll show you why Supercop mixes things together in different layer types now this fiery stuff layer came in as an additive layer and that's because the original layer was set to an additive blending mode but no matter what your layer type right here in the radial menu over to the left our presets now almost everything I've done so far are common techniques and it's really likely that there's a layer preset that already does exactly what I've said to do what's cool about super comp is that it allows you to do a real-time preview in the preview window as you hover over each of these presets it's showing you up here what each of these presets looks like I'm gonna apply this one called explosion core now over time you'll get to know these icons this one is a color correction it's darkening the exposure a bit I'm assuming so it can over crank it a little bit with glow the second one is heat blur now whenever you composite fire into a scene you're supposed to kind of blur the background behind it because that's what fire does photographically the things behind it when it's to mash what's mentioned this obvious fact to Seth were Lee and I we definitely nodded along like we knew this the whole time but anyway heat blur does this automatically using the luma value from your layer to blur everything behind it in a realistic way but this is more than a compound blur you can also add texture and detail to the type of blur that's happening behind and also use that same matte to drive displacement which you can turn all the way up or down soften it out play with a bit I look at this weird result this is all happening because I have a fire layer and stuff behind it Super Comp is applying this color correction this glow this distortion and everything driven by just that fire layer that I had in there already and this may not be appropriate for this comp but maybe I like it and I can right click and save it as a preset and then browse through some of the other presets that they have like look at all these weird results that I can get just from the preset menu I can even do weird stuff like mess with the hue and tint the fire to a different color and look at this all the glow in the scene is now coming from the blue fire and what's funny is that this is all taking longer to describe out loud than to actually do it let me show you an example so let me revert all the way back to before we applied Super Comp I select the four layers I want effect Super Comp in here we can color correct the background select this widget adjust a few points there we go let's color correct this lady as well in a very similar manner then let's add some subtle haze with a higher shadow amount add the default edge blend default light rap yeah looks good and on fiery stuff let's choose a preset let's go with I think explosion core was the one I liked earlier but I'm gonna play with the displacement settings a bit and boost that glow a little as well will color correct our knoll light factory layer just to give it a little bit more punch in the center and I mean that's basically it and granted I knew what I was doing ahead of time but really once you're familiar with all these different widgets they're very quick to apply and you can see the results in very close to real-time when we were working on the demo videos for this one of the things I found myself always doing was adding an adjustment layer above super comp and throwing on an instance of mojo and just like in many other instances of my work before I would also add renoise err as an additional last touch I grabbed a foreground fog asset from action V effects and also a slight blue gradient coming from the top right I'm going to quickly cover our second shot which has many of the exact same elements as the first we've got the green screen footage I'll draw a simple mask around it to avoid the production equipment run prymatt keyer on it the auto button given me a pretty great result on this one though there are a few little parts that need a little bit of cleanup once I've sort of through that I jump to that background that I created for this shot too and create some camera keyframes to create this slight drift into my scene I stick with a pretty subtle camera movement so I don't have to modify my footage of the sorceress once I put these two pre comps together I decide to add the VFX shadow effect to my sorcerous layer shadow is super intuitive it creates this little tee of sorts where you can adjust the ground plane via these two just like that and then grab the direction and pointed wherever you like so with this I'm simulating a bit of a cast shadow from a fire I'm going to comp in front of her next let's add that fire again action VFX has our back to animate and kind of angle this fire and place in this scene I'm actually going to use CC power pin and just animate some points at the beginning and at the end to adjust the fire to the right size that I want I'm using power pin to adjust the perspective instead of using a 3d layer because in the render engine for the current After Effects 3d objects are rendered later and therefore not picked up by super comp properly they were excited to try to include this in a future version to make the fire look like it's casting a bit of light onto the ground I'm gonna use a tool really similar to VFX shadow which is VFX reflection it has basically the exact same kind of controls at first you may notice that your reflection is getting cut off here at the bottom so I need to uncheck clip two bounding box it'll give me this little warning because sometimes a shadow or reflection can get really big compared to your layer size so just be careful with it next I can make it this squat little reflection like that and add some softness to it changing the softness type to simple so I get something that looks a little bit like cast light reacting to exactly what's happening in the footage and honestly we're pretty much ready to move into super comp at this point I'll apply a color correction preset I saved from my previous shot called woods I'll make sure that my fire layer is set as an additive blending mode and apply the big fire preset to it and then on my lady in the foreground I'm actually going to apply two instances of light wrap one that's tight and a little bit brighter and one that's a little bit more softened and subtler I'll also add a touch of edge blend and I think I'm gonna erode her edge a little bit because she comes in pretty sharp just like in my previous shot I'm gonna bring in a foreground fog asset which once I drag into the layer stack I can just click over here on this plus button and it throws it into Supercop along with everything else and then using some of my nifty fractal skills from the Captain Marvel episode I'm gonna create kind of this distorted column of smoke of sorts just to enhance the area a bit over the next few minutes I kind of jump back and forth between layers and balance this out balance that out until I really like how the final comp is coming together and just to give you a reference again these are the input layers that I'm throwing into super comp and here is my output once I've got these two things rendered you can see how they play back to back in our promos that we made for a super cop I even played with this and added a little animated mask to convert the fire from yellowy to blueish and that one simple change in my fire pre-comp affected the glows and everything appearing in this version of the shot now neither of these shots are mind blowing from the VFX standpoint and will definitely hit some more complicated stuff during this Game of Thrones series but one of the things that I hope you learned from these examples was how quick and intuitive Super Comp can feel when applying to a shot using raw materials like this and outputting a final shot like that but honestly one of the best parts of integrating Super Comp into your workflow is that you can shop through final looks really quickly you can browse your different presets and get some really wonderful results using super simple ingredients as it were to go into your shot you don't have to add a series of six adjustment layers to see what a fire and it's compound blur and its distortion map would look like they're all applied right here all together at one workspace and since all of the transform keyframes are preserved in your layers below it means you can work right in the comp that you're designing in anyway so just like with a game of Thrones series we're gonna start off simple and get more and more visually complex as we go through these all of our more complicated shots going forward will springboard off of a lot of these simple concepts stay tuned for more of our Game of Thrones episodes and if you haven't already you should definitely go check out seth Whirlies mind flayer tutorial and just watch that thing like a hundred and forty three times dude it's really good

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 143,966

Keywords: Red giant, visual effects, vfx, motion graphics, filmmaking, color correction, compositing, tutorial, after effects, adobe, trapcode, magic bullet, universe, particular, movies, training, ilm, mograph, software, plugin, postproduction, post production, game of thrones, dracarys, red priestess, cheap tricks, game of thrones vfx, game of thrones visual effects, firebolt, fireball, dnd, dungeons and dragons, sorcerer, sorceress, halloween, halloween video, halloween tutorial

Id: iXLQS7WnB4M

Length: 34min 30sec (2070 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 08 2019