Colorful Glitch FX Tutorial! 100% After Effects!

hey what's up Andrew Kramer here for Video Copilot dotnet and welcome back to another very exciting tutorial today we're gonna be taking a look at creating a stylistic glitch effect inside of After Effects without any third party plugins lots of great tips in this tutorial so be sure to stay till the end but first let's go ahead and take a look at what we're gonna be creating [Music] [Music] all right so we've got lots of cool effects happening here we've got this nice stretchy glitch effect blending together the two titles we've got a really nice looking glow and of course this really great looking reflection on the surface and you can see that a little bit better there so even if you're not into glitch effects the reflection technique is worth checking out on its own and it's a pretty pretty speedy too so you can really use it for a lot of things all right now as you know there's lots of different glitch effects out there but I wanted to try something that was a little bit more fun a little bit more colorful not all glitching has to be you know like an RGB split kind of effect it's important to keep evolving because remember things like jean shorts and pogs used to be popular like for example there's this new trend going on right now involving Tide Pods and if you know anything about this apparently some morons think it's cool to make fun of people who eat them even though they haven't tried one themselves so anyway the point is trends change and the key is to mix ideas together and try to create something that's new all right let's go and get started first thing we'll do is create a new composition I'll call this a glitch 1920 by 1080 and we'll make it ten seconds long hit OK it will go over here to the text tool well type displace and let's Center this up and you'll also notice I have the center alignment set and that way if we edit the text it will Center out from the middle then we'll choose layer pre compose call this title zero zero one move all attributes hit OK okay now let's go and create our displacement map so we'll create a new solid it'll call this displace map hit OK and we'll choose effect noise fractal noise now this is one of my favorite of so we're gonna use this to drive the displacement so we'll come over here we'll set this to block and we'll bring the complexity down to about two and it'll make it a little simpler then we'll go to the transform and we'll uncheck uniform scaling and turn up the scale width that'll stretch it out a bit alright so now we'll turn off the displacement map select our title and we'll choose effect distort displacement map what are we going to do alright well set the map to the displace layer now in after-effects 2018 and newer there's a new render option for every layer selection and it's right here you can choose the source or you can choose the source with effects and masks now in this case when it's set to source nothing really happens but if we set it to effects and mask you can see that we actually start to see the displacement so this effect works pretty well and if I was only using a single instance of this effect it would probably be okay but it's important to note that any time you use a target layer with the effects and masks turned on it actually rear Enders that target layer so for example if I were to duplicate this three times it would actually re render the fractal noise three times so in this particular case I think it's better if we don't use this feature and just pre compose this in the traditional way so what we'll do is we'll take this layer and choose layer pre compose and we'll just call this comp move all attributes we'll hit OK ok so now we have our layer here we'll set the vertical displacement to zero all right so now you can see we move this around and we create a pretty good-looking glitch effect now before we go any further let's go and set the project file to 32 bits per channel so if we alt click on the 16 or 8 bits per channel until it gets to 32 bits per channel that will just make it easier to input color values get better accuracy in our gradients now we have a very basic glitch effect and just as a side point if I were to go to the effects say to the tint effect set this to red and i duplicated the title controlled d and then i say set this to cyan which would be 0 1 1 red green blue hit ok set this to additive and then turned up the displacement a little bit so pretty easy to create a very simple glitch effect but we're actually going to stay on course and create a more stretchy glitch effect so let's go and do that now so I'll take this displacement effect it will set this to 30 and then I'm gonna add another effect from the channel menu called set met and what this effect allows you to do is change the alpha or transparency of a layer so if we put this at the top take the mat from our displacement map and we'll change it from alpha channel to the luminance channel and that's because the displacement map is a luminance map and so what this does now is allows us to have some different gradients in our displacement and in fact there's actually some different levels of transparency so you can see through it here but not really right here so this is a good start now I'm gonna go ahead and lock my comp double click on the displacement map comp and move this over to the side here then we can look at them both will lock that as well and what we need to do to animate this is control the brightness now here's the cool part as I turn the brightness up it turns off the displacement and as I turn it down it turns it up but it also fades it out and what's cool about that is that we can animate the displacement simply by animating the brightness so we'll set a keyframe for the brightness and move forward to say I don't know one second and we'll turn it up til it's all white go and we can just take a look at this move back to the glitch comp hit n on the keyboard and play this back so this is the beginnings of what we're after now how do we improve this a bit so one thing I want to do is add maybe a little bit of detail looks good another thing we could do is add more fractal noise on top of this so we could choose noise fractal noise and maybe set this back to blocky and it gets a little bit muddy I don't really like it when it looks like that so we'll turn the complexity down to two and we'll turn the contrast up and turn these size down now we can actually blend these together so right now this one's just rendering on top well what we could do is set the overflow to clip and then go down to the blending mode and set it to say scream and you can actually see that it blends on top and so maybe what we'll do so it could create streaks in it like that and so depending on the brightness you get something like that alright let's go and just take a look alright so that's a pretty good start with just a couple of layers all right now let's play around with making it look a little bit more stretchy so what we're gonna do is go back over to our glitch comp select our title and take the displacement map layer and we're going to duplicate it so we'll do edit duplicate it maybe one more time maybe one more time alright so we've got four copies here now if we look closely we can see that the displacement is kind of becoming disconnected a little a bit so one thing that we can do to smooth that out is jump back over to the displacement map so we'll choose effect blur fast box blur set it to horizontal and turn on repeat edge pixels and we'll just turn this up a little bit and as you let go it updates in the next comp so maybe ten that looks pretty good and we can play around with this a little bit later as we sort of see what the different settings do now one thing about this currently is that it all seems to be moving over at the same time it's okay but it's all moving kind of at the same speed so if we go back to our fractal noise we can turn the contrast up to say like a few hundred maybe three hundred and now you can see it's sort of stretches and different speeds and this is basically where we can start playing around with the settings so this is one of my favorite things about the fractal noise is that it's driving this entire animation so I could do things like turn up the complexity I could change the evolution of the fractal noise and it changes the end result of the animation all right now let's go ahead and look at our keyframe so it looks like it's on a little bit in the beginning and it's not totally off at the end now I don't want to throw too many ideas along the way but for example you could animate the evolution say for example you just turn the brightness down just a bit so you kind of leave it glitching out and then you take the evolution at you and just animate the cycle and now you just sort of get kind of just a flowing animation and this can be cool as sort of just like a secondary animation something just to give the title a little bit of life but maybe not this much life but any we'll turn that off what we do need to do is animate the brightness fully off set a keyframe for the brightness move forward about maybe one and a half seconds and we'll turn the brightness back up alright so I think this looks pretty good now quick thing just to note we have a offset here so if we say set this offset to say negative thirty negative thirty negative the displacement will come in from the opposite direction and again if you feel like you need to smooth out some of the stretching just go to the displacement map and turn up the box blur in fact set the iterations down to one and that way it's a more linear blur now if we want to customize this further we could play around with the displacement map we could also play around with how many displacement map effects we're using currently we're using four but we could duplicate it and make a few more and it'll create a slightly different look but just keep in mind that it will slow your render down so if you only need three only use three if you only need or if you don't need any that'll be the fastest I think we'll do how about we do five now we're going to colorize our title so we'll select it choose effect color correction color Rama and does a crazy effect we'll move it to the top of the stack now just like the set matte effect we're actually going to use the displacement map to drive the colorization so the way we do that is we go into the input and we add a phase and we select the displacement map and oh wow look at this it's crazy you know what this reminds me of this reminds me of that commercial all right so that looks pretty crazy but at least the colors are changing so now we could go into the output cycle and we could change it so if we do ramp gray it'll just be a gradient but we could click right here and change it to a color so we could do blue and then maybe click here and do like the same blue and then maybe you know like a cyan kind of brighter blue now the edges get a little bit sharp so under modify turn off modify alpha and turn off composite over layer alright so this is a good start now let's see if we can make it look a little bit better and maybe try a different color all right so next I want to animate between two different titles so what I'll do is a little bit of cleanup first let's double click on our title number one and over here in our textures I have something called grid texture and let's put that over top it's just kind of like a noisy pattern and we'll set the transfer mode to stencil luma and this will just give it a bit of texture we'll add a curves adjustment now to give it a bit more detail I'm going to add motion tile oh yeah this is effects console plug-in free plugin from Video Copilot we can just come over here to effects in presets type in motion tile drag that over but the FX console works the same way you could just do it with a keyboard shortcut so keyboard shortcut motion tile hit enter boom saves a couple clicks okay so with the motion tile effect I'm gonna set the width down to like 25 and what this does just sort of repeats the pattern and just gives it a little bit of detail there it's kind of nice maybe a little bit brighter and we can close that all right cool so that just gives it a little bit of texture now the other cleanup thing I want to do is I want to brighten the red it's a little bit dull it's a little bit transparent so if we just add a curves adjustment and move it right after the set Matt turn up the alpha channel just click just drag it up a bit all right so how do we animate between two different titles well one thing to point out is on the set matte effect there's an invert matte and if I turn that on it actually starts on and then fades out so this is a really easy way to create a transition that goes away just by clicking one button now of course the thing that drives this entire animation is two keyframes on the displacement map so if we hit you we can grab these two keyframes and say move forward to two seconds and just shift the animation so now if we look here it doesn't start until two seconds then I can go to the project take the title number one hit edit duplicate then we could double click on that and we could change this to and then I'll close it and then if we take the title number one we could choose edit duplicate and here's the trick you hold down alt and drop it onto the layer and watch it goes from one to two so what's cool about that is basically swaps the layers now one says displace and one says glitch so we'll go to one of them and click invert and then if we go back to two seconds and play it back we've got a cool animation now I kind of think it's cool that it shifts over from the left to the right but you don't want that what you can do is go into the comp and just move it over alright that looks really cool and of course what makes this so fun is that if I go to the displacement map I can play with the fractal noise so I could play around with the height and it changes the look of the glitch and that's the power of this technique is for controlling the entire animation with just two keyframes another fun thing we could do is we could rotate the direction of the glitch so for example I could double click on title number one and say parent the grid to the title and then go to the rotation and set it to negative 45 and then go back and now the glitch is rotated and then I can take the layer and add 45 and I could do that for the other title as well it's parent it to the glitch rotate it I may have to move this one actually but something like that then go back to the glitch and rotated forward 45 degrees so that's pretty cool so just an idea I'm gonna go ahead and undo that all right so now that we have our animation done let's create that reflective surface so I'll go ahead and close our texture here now we have our glitch comp inside of our project right here and drop it into a new comp and that way instead of three layers we just have one layer so what we'll do is we'll hit f4 toggle the switches and make it a 3d layer so I can make a new camera a 20-millimeter real wide and I can rotate around this so now we have somewhat of a 3d layer and I'm gonna take this glitch layer and you see it's right in the middle here and what I want to do is move it up so it's above the middle ground because this is gonna be the floor then I'm gonna duplicate the layer edit duplicate take the rotation tool flip it upside down hold shift until it snaps and then I'm gonna move it down so it's about equal distance away perfect all right so now this is the reflection layer let's put this at the bottom call this reflect glitch and now we can come over here take this texture floor grid and we'll make it a 3d layer and this is just sort of a textured image that's been tiled and we'll take the rotation tool and we'll rotate it down flat and we can move it into position here maybe scale it down to about 50% and then we'll take that layer and choose layer precompose and we'll move all the attributes so floor texture and hit okay now you see that the 3d stopped working and that's because the 3d layer is inside of the pre-comp so what we're gonna do is turn on this switch right here it's called the collapse transformation switch and now we can see that it's updating properly but I don't even want it to be on so I'm gonna turn it off now in order to get this bottom copy to look like an actual reflection we're gonna create an adjustment layer and we're gonna place it only above the reflect glitch and then we'll choose effect blur compound blur and then we're gonna select the floor texture layer and look at that we've got something that's working pretty good now one thing I want to do is take the reflect layer and add a vertical blur so I'm going to choose blur fast box blur set it to vertical and just turn it up a little bit just to kind of give it more of a realistic reflection look turn that back on and what we can do reflect blur is we could turn up the maximum amount of blur see that and it just creates a different look now keep in mind that the floor is a limited 3d space so what you could do is inside of the comp here is you can move it forward since the most important area is up front but you'll see that it reacts to the color now you can see we can play this back it looks really cool and the key is just to make sure that you don't cut off the bottom layer so you could turn it on and just kind of double check see it maybe even scale it down a little bit you can even just make a camera in here and that we could just move it around and you know push it a little closer but one thing I like about this is to actually see the texture grid so what I'll do is I'll lock this view and then double click on the floor texture I'll move this over and lock it is if I take this texture here I can color correct it and based on the brightness it will either be really glossy and polished it's kind of like two coats of wax or just one all right let's see if we can actually make this look good so first thing I'll do is set the camera to like 600 and that way I can get closer and we just have like a more wide angle shot no we can kind of move the camera get a little dimension now the other thing I want to do is add a black solid to the background this always helps when you're blending layers over other layers now one thing I notice is the reflection looks a little bit too close to the surface so let's move that layer down a bit I think that feels a bit better now the other thing we did in the original examples we had a little bit of illumination on the ground so let's start by creating a new solid something like kind of dark gray and we'll take the mask tool and we'll just do a large mask and hit F will feather this out a bit and we'll set this to say screen and we're just looking to add a little bit of density to the ground and maybe even just a bit less just just to look like there's illumination now next thing I'll do is create another new solid and this time a little bit of blue and we're just gonna have it coming from above so I'll draw a soft mask hit F or feather this out a lot all right so that looks pretty good got the basic idea that we could animate the camera so go to half res take the camera hit P hold shift hit a set a keyframe move these two keyframes over to the start here and you know take the unified camera tool and right click drag forward maybe orbit a little bit it's fun sort of like chase the glitch it's fun to make an excuse for a misplaced keyframe like oh I was trying to preempt the glitch I was anticipating the glitch and remember it's a fully procedural effect so I could go into title number one and maybe just swap it out with a logo go back all right looking good now a couple other extra tips I like to try to make sure everything is in the tutorials if we want to add a little camera shake we could alt click on the stopwatch for the point of interest and we could type wiggle parenthesis maybe 7 comma 15 in bracket something just like that let's see how that looks yeah that's a lot maybe just 7 comma 5 it's not too bad could do a little less it's fun now this is a new technique that I've been playing around with it's not perfect but it's quite interesting for this specific case so what we're gonna do is create an adjustment layer now my goal is to add glow to just the red part like I almost wanted to seem like it's burning away as it glitches so we need to isolate just the red now we might change the color so we need to isolate the green or the blue so the way we're going to do this is we're going to isolate the saturation so if we choose effect channel we can take the set channel effect and instead of using the Alpha Channel use the saturation Channel so what that does is gets rid of everything that doesn't have a lot of saturation because it becomes transparent and the only thing that has a lot of saturation is really vivid bright color so this is a good start then we could do a solid composite and then I'll just fill the transparency in set it to black and then we can add a glow on top of this so say stylize and glow and maybe a hue and saturation just for good measure and you guys have seen me do this a few times I turned the threshold down turn up the radius just a bit lower the intensity and then duplicate it and then turn the radius up a bit and it's just sort of like a give-and-take and then we'll take the last glow and duplicate it one more time I think three usually looks pretty good nice and wide and then we can bring some of the brightnesses down for the ones below it so what I'm trying to do is keep it nice and tight around the bright areas and then with the hue and saturation we could go to the red channel and maybe shift the hue just a bit so now how do we get it back so we go to the transfer mode and set this layer to additive just like that so we'll call this color glow let's take a look so that works pretty good I think you know maybe just set the thresholds down to five five and five so it really catches all of the intensity and then it's just a matter of tweaking these values so they get a really nice soft glow and maybe we want to color correct the glow well we could add a curves adjustment on top of that maybe bring the saturation down just a touch so it looks nice now here's the fun part so if we were to then open up our glitch comp and go into each of these go to the Colorama and maybe maybe read isn't doing it for us we're going to switch it to something like blue well we just change it on each of the two layers and you can see I'm picking a very saturated blue at the top here okay and then back to the final comp and now that color is glowing and the white of the letters is not glowing so it's still very clear after it's done all right so this is looking good one other thing I did was create a little bit of light on the ground and the way I did that was I just took a copy of the glitch on top duplicated it we could solo it here now I'm gonna bring the position down back to the center which is 540 and then rotate this flat and let's switch over to the custom view real quick just so we can see this so I'm going to add a blur so a fast box blur and we'll duplicate it again and blur it out even more and duplicate it one more time and blur it out so we're just creating a really soft looking glow in fact I'm gonna take this first copy I'm gonna shrink it down so it's real real narrow okay they'll go back to the active camera all right cool so that's the illumination trick now we could set these layers to say additive and that'll blend a little bit nicer now I don't know how long this tutorial is but there was one other thing that I had created which was this sort of artificial intelligence glitching animation and I used the same techniques as before and you could see that I just have a logo with a set mat based on this fractal noise here and then I have another fractal noise which is a bit softer which is animating the movement back and forth and then I just have a couple more copies to just sort of make it look a little crazier I'll be sure to put this project file online so you can deconstruct it alright so we went over a ton of cool things hopefully you learn some cool tricks and more importantly hopefully I showed you enough ways to be able to customize this and learn from these different techniques so you can create your own crazy glitch effects as always visit the website Video Copilot dotnet gonna put this project file up there and some of my other project files from other interesting glitch failed experiments so download those have fun if you are looking for some glitch sound effects and you can't find some check out our motion pulse collection tons of awesome digital glitchy sound effects that you can customize anyways I am Andrew Kramer and we will see you next time

Channel: Video Copilot

Views: 1,460,907

Rating: 4.9749722 out of 5

Keywords: after effects, Advanced, Procedural, Title, Template, Tutorial

Id: 3Rc0dNDzbuM

Length: 35min 39sec (2139 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 06 2018