Designing Cinematic 3D Camera Movement & Lighting in After Effects!

hey what's going on guys I'm like for mobiles graphics and we're back with another video this time a sort of cinematic camera movement with a spotlight and this is a really cool effect if you want to do a sort of like photo slideshow for maybe a bridal or a wedding event video or maybe like a documentary so I thought this looked pretty cool I use it in one of my past projects so I'm just gonna show you how this was done all in After Effects but before we get started I just want to give a quick word to our sponsor Skillshare Skillshare is an online learning community that offers membership with meaning with so much to explore real projects to create and the support of fellow creatives Skillshare empowers you to accomplish real growth make 2020 a year where you explore new skills deep in existing passions and get lost in creativity what you find might just surprise you and inspire you Skillshare offers classes designed for real life so you can move your creative journey forward without 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it's pretty clear these are 2d layers but if you consider that this is all an After Effects and not like blender or something like that I think it looks pretty realistic anyways let's just go ahead and get started I'm not going to show you how I did all of these photos yet I'm gonna put that at the very end so if you want to see how I how I added like the texts and stuff and the borders I'll show that at the very end but in the beginning we'll just show how we set up this scene so that way if that's what you're for you get quit right to the right to the tutorial so I'm just gonna start by creating a new composition composition new and 1920 by 1080 is fine thirty seconds is good the longer the better 25 frames per second is perfect so I'm just gonna hit OK I do have one layer here it's kind of very long it's got a very long name but basically if I hit R on the keyboard and rotate this 90 and then scale this down by hitting S on the keyboard you can see it's basically just a marble texture I just needed some sort of texture as my table you could use wood there's all different types of textures but this one was free so I decided that I'll use this one and I'm going to make this a 3d layer and I'm going to add a layer new camera just hit OK and layer new light and I'm gonna choose spotlight and hit okay first things first if this wasn't a 3d layer you wouldn't see the spotlight so that's important in the material options here which let me just rename this by hitting enter and typing in table you can adjust some of these settings on the table like diffuse and specular if I can manage to grab it the problem really is is After Effects isn't really great at at any of this stuff so if you change it on one layer but you don't change it on other layers it doesn't blend light the way that kind of maybe cinema 4d or blender would do so I recommend just leaving these all the same and just kind of make sure you hide the spots that it doesn't quite look right in the sense that the layers maybe aren't of this right properties so with that being said we could start adjusting our spotlight so I'm just going to open this up and go under light options the first thing I do is I increase the feather one thing about spotlights is they can be very harsh and I'm just going to increase the cone angle until the whole thing is lit and now I'm gonna start dropping in my images so I'm just gonna select all of these images all of my layers which I'll show you what they are right now but first let me make sure they're all 3d layers by hitting that cube hit s on the keyboard and scaling them all down so the first ooh okay one thing to note see how blurry all of this is it's because since we are using a camera it does have a focal distance so while I go through this let me just show you how I would adjust the focal distance I would maybe change the to top view and you can see here on this camera layer this line here is the focal distance with that there is our table so let me just open up the camera here and go to maybe transform no I'm sorry camera options and increase the focal distance so it's pretty close this isn't gonna be permanent so we can make adjustments later but just so everything's in focus so you can see one I call this earth layer this was a Voyager space probe artwork that was sent out to space I've got a logo layer I've got one photo two photos and then the rest are just photos so make those all visible I'm going to drag them all underneath my camera just so my layers are all correct and now I'm gonna start basically moving these layers around and scaling and rotating them and pretty much create a table setup so earth is gonna be on the bottom and I'm just gonna kind of hit S on the keyboards maybe scale it up hit R on the keyboard rotate it a bit just to make it look a bit random my logo is probably the least important I'm actually gonna drag that to the bottom that's gonna be somewhere over here not quite sure where yet so I'm just going to move these around and we'll be right back [Music] okay so all of my images kind of lay down on the table and now let's start moving this camera into its first position so I'm going to just hit p on the keyboard set a keyframe R on the keyboard set keyframes for all of those rotations open this up we're gonna be making some adjustments to the focal distance and the aperture and I think that's it so I'll just hit U on the keyboard actually you know what before I do the camera stuff let me show you how to get some neat shadows on these layers but let me show you the drawback of the shadows built in After Effects so I'm just gonna select this image here and open this up and go to material options and go to cast shadows and set that to on now with certain lights the cast shadow works pretty well but let me show you what happens when you use spotlight when you pull this up that shadow is like you know as black as you could possibly get and it's super harsh so for this case since these images are just sitting on a table the shadow is like very minor so what I'm gonna do instead is just do a drop shadow this obviously wouldn't work in all cases but in the cases that we have here I think it's gonna be just fine so let me show you which settings I would use the base settings are pretty close though I would change the softness maybe to something like 2 and maybe the opacity down to like 30 and just increase the distance maybe to 8 you obviously don't want a ton of distance but that just adds just a tiny tiny bit of depth to the table that might not be there otherwise so obviously softness is maybe 20 with a distance of maybe like 2 obviously you know you just mess around with these settings but it just adds just a slight amount of depth so I can just copy this drop shadow and paste it on all of my layers [Music] might need to adjust it per one but actually I think that that's probably about right they're all about the same size and then the next thing I want to do for some of these vintage photos is I'm gonna add a rough and edges um but I'm gonna make sure I put the rough and edges above the drop shadow or else you get some really weird settings so let me kind of show you what the rough and edges is doing it's basically kind of tearing the edges of the paper which looks really cool especially with the drop shadow depending on how much you want you just want to adjust the border I obviously don't want a ton you can increase the scale to maybe smooth it out a bit but you just kind of want to mess with these settings I want something not quite that big maybe set that to 20 and that kind of adds just a little bit of texture to the end and I'm gonna do the same just copy that control C and paste it on to my other layer okay so now we can officially start adjusting the camera in the shot so hit U on the keyboard get all my settings back up and let's start messing with these settings so first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to change this to for view that way I could better judge where my camera is while also seeing with the active camera so the tabletop if I select the table you can see is right there so we want this to be much closer to the table and we want it to start on this end of the table but we want to rotate the camera so it's in so it's kind of like really flat up against the table obviously we're gonna have to reduce some rotation but we want this to be really close to the table so I'm just keeping an eye over here just to see if I'm coming close which I think that that's pretty close this by the way is like more like a a cyan art than a science like you just have to like just keep adjusting the settings until the angle looks good to you so taking this here I could kind of pull this over and I want again to be over this photo first using all of the tools in my repository to get this as close as possible so you can see here that we're losing some stuff there on the end I get it ass on the keyboard on this table layer and since it's 4k I've got a lot of room that I could actually expand this so let me just set this to like 100 and that helps us a lot okay so I think that that looks actually pretty good so okay so I'm back to where my camera angle is this is very similar to what we started with in the other in the kind of sample I'm gonna go to 20 seconds and I'm gonna set all of these back to their original state so it started at 960 by 540 maybe 0 0 0 0 0 0 doubt the reason why I do this is because once the camera starts like rotating and stuff it becomes very difficult to know exactly what any of these toggles are gonna do especially when you're only in one view when you're in the four view at least you can kind of manipulate it but when you're in the one view you start rotating these things these layers are going places you didn't you didn't know even existed so I wanted to end obviously on the logo here I'm gonna give myself some proportional grids and just move the camera into position and now we can take a look at our first camera movement yeah that's on the key ctrl s to save and maybe bring this down to a quarter I think we need to move some of these images I don't think they're they're in the perfect position but that looks pretty good to start with so this image here I'm gonna bring it maybe a little bit closer to the camera and I'm just gonna scrub through this and make sure all of these images are appropriately placed [Music] okay so next thing I want to do is I want to adjust the camera focal distance and the aperture so since we're really close to the table this aperture is gonna be pretty high I'm gonna go as far as I say it's probably like like 80 pixels and I'm gonna bring in this focal distance until this image ISM is in complete view or in complete focus so like right there is a good spot to start maybe ATS too high maybe seventy and one thing I should also do here is open this up and under Irish shape I'm gonna increase this like hexagon because the fast rectangle is just a little bit crummy crummy looking so let's increase that so now let's scrub through here come to the end increase the focal distance so that layer is in focus if it's hard to tell again you might need to go to full scale mode but also if you change this view to I think its top you could see exactly where the focal point is and let's bring that out and make sure that's perfect go back to the after you've camera and that's basically perfect so now we should be able to scrub through this and the focal distance should all change and actually it will basically be tracking this this table in essence so all of these people and photos should become in focus at some point and now I'm going to set the table dressings for the other side and last thing I'm going to do is now it just change the position of the light again hit ctrl s to save all the time so that way it never crashes so now spotlight I'm just gonna open this up and set a keyframe for let's see maybe a point of interest and position hit U on the keyboard hit you on the keyboard K on the keyboard to bounce to and and whoa our light is crazy in weird spots so again let's just go to the four view and we can much better see where our light is so our position is there we basically want to take this light and I'm gonna again or I'm going to let's see maybe move the light over so the light is basically right on top of this layer and the focal position should basically be the logo so pretty much I just moved the light and move the focal point oh man it looks like I messed up the original focal point in the original light position so no problem we could fix that I'm just setting these back to 960 by 540 which is I think where it started and so that looks pretty good and now I'm gonna add some smoothing here with this mount mograph tool actually turned out I never changed the aperture so I'm just gonna uncheck that keyframe and I'm going to add just some smoothing here you could of course just use the graph editor but man to go through each one of these to make sure it was correct that'd be a nightmare I just use mountain graph they don't sponsor this video it's just I use it all the time so let's go ahead and scrub through this and see and that's pretty much it that's all you need to do cool the cool thing about once this is set up for different clients you could just come in here and just change these photos and it will change in the main composition which is super helpful and you could just move them around change the the table obviously this one's marble so it's white but you could change the table to wood or or whatever suits the look that you're going for anyways guys I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please be sure to subscribe check out the other videos on this channel head to our patreon account if you want to download this project file and I'm just going to show you how I did the photos now for those of you that were curious let's jump into the first photo here which is based on one on the original witch so this is the original photo and this is what we did do it not a whole lot here we didn't use Photoshop we just did everything in after-effects changes to full so the first thing is is I have my photo second up I have an adjustment layer that I actually had turned off but when I do this sometimes you're dealing with a lot of vintage photos and they all have slightly different tonality to them some some colorimetry to the paper and stuff that they make they'll they all look different and sometimes that looks a little bit off so I'll just add a tint sometimes to add like you know in this case a little bit of yellow to the white and in other cases kind of make all the photos look the same the next thing I did was I added the border around the image and I added this kind of folded paper art so what I did was I set this to multiply you could see when it's unnormal it just looks like that I set it to multiply and for the text up here I just have a couple handwritten notes so I basically wrote this down took a picture brought it in After Effects handwriting you can never beat it it always you could always tell it's Hannah and no fonts can match handwritten basically what I did was I created a mask around the layer added a feather to that mask you can see here it was originally set to normal but I added a curves adjustment to it I changed the blending mode to multiply and that's as simple as that and so it's very clearly Hana written and it just adds a lot of really cool texture to the image for photo number two I just added the border photo three and four and five I didn't really do anything except for photo four I did add a crease as well as why are we here again another scanned image I added a curves adjustment so originally it looked like that when it was set to normal so I added a curves adjustment and I set it to multiply and there it looks just like somebody wrote on this photograph and so pretty much that's it so anyways guys if you enjoyed this video subscribe check out other videos on this channel anyways guys thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: MOBOX Graphics

Views: 27,133

Rating: 4.9791846 out of 5

Keywords: mobox, after effects, tutorial, vfx, motion graphics, after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, 3d camera tutorial, advanced camera tutorial, after effects camera tutorial, Advanced 3D Camera Movement & Lighting in After Effects!, 3d camera after effects, camera blue after effects

Id: uOJyi2nabuo

Length: 20min 6sec (1206 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 14 2020