Creating a Collage Trail Effect in After Effects | Sports Graphics

if you keep up with motion design Trends then you should have seen this collage Trail effect most likely in the graphics for sports adjacent clients like ESPN or Nike as you can see from these examples this effect is versatile and can be altered and expanded to achieve a wide range of looks today I'm going to be showing you how you can create this effect and Implement a style similar to these two pieces I made on side of After Effects quick heads up achievements effect requires some simple rotoscoping and scene tracking I wanted to make the tutorial light so I won't be going over those in detail but if you need to refresh on any of these techniques you can find lots of tutorials on YouTube the first thing you're going to want to consider is shot choice this effect won't work for all footage obviously personal tasting are coming to play a bit here but here are a few principles to keep in mind to help you get the most out of this effect camera moves ideally will be in One Direction such as a push-in or a pan anything more complicated like a handheld shot whipping around probably won't give you the best results the effect is better showcased when the subject is moving across the frame a bit so you can see each new layer appearing behind them also you don't want to have any motion blur as that will counter the collage cutout look we're going for and also make your life harder when rotoing how do you want to use the effect for this project I wanted to use the nostalgic scrapbook feel of this effect to evoke a feeling of schoolyard epicness keeping all that in mind I went with this shot from Pavel beniliac I found for free on pixels I think the slow pushing is subtle but will work well his jump has a nice Arc to it and it's shot in slow motion so I can time remap it to get the exact feel I'm looking for once we've got our shot we can get to work the first thing I'm going to do is some time remapping to get this feeling the way I want I think we'll have it start off at close to regular speed that is he lifts off go into slow motion then as he comes down we'll ramp out once I'm happy with that I'm going to quickly render it out and bring it back in once I've got that render I can get out my rotor brush and start cutting since you want this scrapbook feel it's totally fine if the Roto isn't 100 perfect then when we're happy with that we can go ahead and render it out as a PNG sequence make sure you turn on Alpha so that the background is transparent now we're going to go back to our time remap export and get our tracking data your first instinct might be to create a 3D camera that is not how we're going to do it you definitely could use a 3D camera but it's going to create a lot more work and for the style I want to achieve I don't think it's super important so I'm going to go into the tracker panel and select track motion and because my camera is moving in the z-axis I'm going to track position rotation and scale if your camera is only panning like in these two examples you can actually get away with just tracking position now when you're tracking the motion don't choose points on anything that's moving you'll also want to track points that are relatively close to your subject I track the backboard in this example but if I track something like the trees in the background obviously they're not moving as much and the data we got wouldn't have correctly imitated the 3D motion we're going for now that we have that tracking data we have all the pieces we need to put this effect together now we're going to open a new comp and paste our tracking data into it you can see I've got all of my uh tracking data there and then we're going to bring our image sequence in which we brought in as individual images not as an image sequence I'm going to drag them all in if our subject is moving towards the camera they'll want the last image on top and if they're moving away from the camera want the last image on the bottom it's the ladder in my case so I can just leave them as is now for the least fun part starting on the first frame we're going to parent it to the tracker then we're going to go one frame down which I'm just doing with command and arrow down one frame over which I'm doing with command right arrow and then control square bracket to set the start point of that layer there and then parent into the tracking data at that frame and then we're going to repeat this process command down Command right set endpoint and parent to tracker command down Command right set endpoint parent to tracker command down Command right set endpoint parent to tracker this Tech can take a while depending on how long your sequence is so I'd recommend figuring out what moment in the sequence you actually want the trail to appear first once we're all done unless your subject is moving across the frame really quickly you get this cool fourth dimensional worm looking thing however this makes it quite difficult to see each individual frame so you probably only want to see every second third or fourth one instead of having to turn off the layers see if looks good then turn them back on I've run a little expression which will automatically turn off every second third fourth layer or however many you want first let's go into our tracking data null and add a slider control and rename it frame rate then we'll go into the opacity of our first layer we need to lock that and then we'll go into the opacity of our first layer and pick whip that value we'll create a new variable and call that one that frame rate F and then another new variable and call up the index of this layer which is just this number over here then we're going to write the following expression let me explain what it means the percentage sign symbol means when the first number is divided by the second number give me the remainder so this expression means if when the index number is divided by the frame rate number we set the remainder is equal to zero AKA if the frame rate number goes perfectly into the index number then make the opacity a hundred or show this layer otherwise hide the layer so when it's set to zero we're not going to see any layers but when we set this to one we'll see every single layer in our sequence and then if we do two every other layer three every third layer four every fourth layer five every fifth layer I think I likes every six layer I really want to be able to kind of see these distinct cut out shapes that's working well for me you might like it with the warm effect on everyone it's up to you now just drop that into your main timeline with the original Roto and you should be good to go now it's just about adding additional effects to support the look you're going for first I made mine black and white and then had it go into color when the Scrapbook effect comes in to help it hit a bit harder then I went through and added a little posterize wiggle to the position of my images to give them the moving around look of a real animated collage next I pre-comp some of them and gave them overlays that fit my theme Here I used a picture of Michael Jordan and some school graph paper then I added an arrow to emphasize the subject's movement and give it even more layers then I added a transform and posterized Wiggles on the position scale and rotation to help the collage look hit even harder and lastly I'd add some textured overlays to finish it all off and there you go this is a really fun effect to play around with because you can get a super loose and experimental with it and it really just keeps throwing ideas in there and seeing what works if you use this tool to make anything I'd love to see us attack me on Instagram also I'm trying different stuff this tutorial where it's more a general overview of the techniques used than a specific walkthrough so let me know what you think in the comments below and if you have any questions I'll be happy to help you out cheers

Channel: Toby Garrow

Views: 339,405

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Id: uJor5NsSohk

Length: 7min 24sec (444 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 22 2023