Hey guys, Steve from Unexplored Films here and today we are going to try and recreate the famous Doctor Who regeneration effect, where one actor playing the
Doctor transforms into the next. So Doctor Who is about
a time-traveling alien who looks like a human, and the main character "the Doctor" can change appearance and
personality by regenerating. And this is a really convenient
excuse to recast the actor every time the series needs to. Now, back in the early days, this was often a very basic
fade between the two actors, but we based ours on the
modern era of Doctor Who, which started with Christopher Eccleston, where the effect became
much more dramatic. Specifically, we were
going for a combination of David Tennant
transforming into Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi transforming
into Jodie Whittaker. So for this effect,
you'll need two people, one to play the first Doctor and one to play the second Doctor. So this is a bit like our
Mission Impossible mask effect. And if you're enjoying
these DIY Hollywood effects and tutorials, please
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amazing support so far for this channel. So we do most of the effects
we try in a single take, but we decided to shoot this
one as a series of shots, almost like a short film, because that's how it's
normally done in the show. You can add as many shots as you like, but we decided that the
four main ones were: a shot of the first Doctor realizing he is beginning to change, a wide shot with lots of dramatic effects but no real detail of the change, a closeup where you
actually see the change happening from the first
Doctor to the second Doctor, and then finally the big
reveal of the second Doctor. Now although we did all these shots in our green screen studio, you could actually use a real
background for most of them. And out of these four main shots, the only one where you
really need a green screen to make life easier is the closeup where you see the change
happening between the two Doctors. And if you want to see how to
create backgrounds like this, check out our video on how
to add yourself into movies. So we went ahead and did
the other shots first. The wide shot, the shot at
the second Doctor's big reveal and the shot of the first Doctor realizing he's going to change. And for this, we actually
made the hand glow as a practical effect,
which nobody ever thinks of, but we set up a light
with a dimmer switch, just pointing at the hand, and I could actually
operate this out of shot while I raised my hand into the light and this really gave
the effect a head start. So it just shows you don't always need to add this stuff later if
you can do it on the day. This now just left the shot of
the actual change happening. Now because this was so close up, we decided to use a chair for this because it would keep our shoulders in the same place each time. So we each filmed our
best transformation face and basically tried to
do the same movement. Once we checked that these shots were basically very similar, we had everything we needed filmed and it was time to head into editing. So the first thing I did
was open these two clips in After Effects and line
them up on top of each other in the best place. And I faded the opacity
down on the first Doctor to reveal the second Doctor underneath. Next I added the mesh
warp tool to the layer with the first Doctor, and this creates this
grid and you can adjust the number of rows and columns you want. Next, I set the opacity
of this layer to 50% so that I could see the
second Doctor underneath. Then under distortion mesh, I could drop a key frame at the beginning and one at the end. We're going to leave
the one at the beginning and change the one at the
end so that the face distorts and matches the second Doctor. So make sure you're on
that second key frame, and now we can change
the first Doctor's face to match the second Doctor
that we can see underneath. So for this I was matching
things like the eyes, the eyebrows, the nose,
the mouth position, and the hair, and then
there's also the shirt collar and the shoulders. So this is going to make
the change much more subtle. Now we can drop the mesh warp
onto the second Doctor's layer and do the process in reverse. We can make two key frames
under distortion mesh, and this time we're going to
leave the second one alone and change the first one. So now we can stretch and
distort the second Doctor's face to look like the first Doctor's face. And because our second
Doctor had longer hair than our first one, I
tucked in this long hair with the shape of the first
Doctor's head and shoulders so that it would slowly
appear out one side. And now if we reset our opacity so that first Doctor disappears completely during the change, we get a
lovely, smooth morph effect. Next we can add key light, or the key light animation preset, which also gives you
some other tools with it. And we're going to use the eyedropper to remove the green screen. And then the screen matte options of clip black and white to refine it until we have a nice key. So with this effect
applied to both Doctors, now we can see that change
without the background. And that's why this shot is
definitely the one to do in front of a green screen. Next, we can precompose
this into a single layer and we can drop in a background behind it and maybe do some color correcting. And now we're going to
leave this shot alone until later when we've
built some more effects to put over the top of it. Now, a lot of people have
already tried this effect in various ways using different plugins, but we wanted to try and do it only with what's already
available in After Effects. So because the various
changing effects in Doctor Who have been kind of different each time, I'm just going to suggest
several different effects you can try and you can pick
and choose your favorites. And if you want any of these to apply to just the Doctor's
skin and not the body, you can always duplicate
the layer with your actor and use the pen tool to
draw a mask around the body. So to begin with, we're going
to make the skin subtly glow in this first shot of the Doctor realizing that he's changing. So to do this, I duplicated
the layer and precomposed it. Next, I added Keylight, and instead of removing a green screen, I used the skin color
as the color to remove. By changing the view to combined matte and by turning clip
white all the way to zero and clip black up to about 50%, we got this kind of terrifying
Michael Myers Halloween face. But what it means is that
we get this nice isolation of the skin color. I precomposed this again, and this time ticked 'move all attributes into
the new composition'. Now, if we open this pre
composition, inside it, we can add a black solid, which we're going to add
the fractal noise effect to. And we're going to move this
solid with the fractal noise under the layer with the skin. In the fractal noise, I
changed the type to smeary, and then I changed the
blend mode on the skin layer to stencil luma. We can now see the fractal noise effect through the light parts of the skin. Next I adjusted the
fractal noise a bit more. I increased the contrast
and reduced the scale. And then I added some key frames to offset turbulence and evolution. I key framed both of
these for a few seconds so that the pattern evolves
and the whole thing moves. So now if we close that precomposition and come back to our original timeline, we can see that effect in place. Next, I added the glow
effect to that precomposition with the skin, and for glow colors I changed that to A and B colors and just changed them
to be something kind of orangy and yellowy. Then I brought the threshold down a bit and increased the radius a bit. And for the blend mode of that layer, I had a slightly better result changing it from normal to screen. Next, I added a blur
effect to the same layer and blurred it to 50. Finally, I also added
the light rays effect and increased the intensity. Again, changed the colors to be something kind of light orangy, increase the radius and
key framed the center so that the rays moved
around a little bit. So now I could key frame
the opacity on this rather complicated skin layer so that all these effects
would start appearing very subtly as the shot continued. Phew, okay. For our next trick, we're going to create a sort of heatwave. So we're going to make
a new adjustment layer and put it at the very top. And then we're going to apply the effect called turbulent displace, which makes everything kind
of look like you're seeing it through a swimming pool. Now we can key frame
amount, size, and evolution, and change that over
time, starting from zero. This will gradually distort anything that's under this layer. And if we don't want this
to apply to the whole shot, but just to the figure, we can, of course, draw a
mask around it and feather it. And then it only affects
this part of the shot. Okay, now it's time to
create some particles. So we're going to create a new solid to apply our particle effect to, and we're going to look
for particle world. That will create this thing
that looks like a firework over a grid. The first thing
we can do is turn the grid off and then under particle, we're going to change it
from line to faded sphere. Then if we change the
birth color and death color to something that looks
kind of bright and shiny, that's going to help as well. Now we can key frame the birth rate, which is how many particles are appearing and start it from zero and end up with something low, like two. You can also change the
birth and death size to alter how big the particles will be. Now under physics, we
can change the animation from explosive to vortex
and the velocity will alter how quickly the particles appear and move. We can also change the gravity to affect whether the particles will fall or whether they will float away. So I set this just below zero so that they would float up very slowly. Now, if we open this menu called producer, we can alter the size of this red circle, which is the area where the particles are being created from. So I just altered this to
much the head of the Doctor. If the head moves around, we can key frame the producer
area so that the particles will keep being created
wherever the head moves. Finally, I added a radial
fast blur to these particles, and I simply put the center of the blur below where they were coming from, and that gives it some motion
blur below each particle. And like everything else, if we slowly raise the
opacity of the particle layer, they will slowly begin to appear. I actually copied and
pasted this particle layer onto the hand as well
and altered its position to match the hand. And that just gave some
very subtle particles beginning to appear from the hand as well. Next, I added some smoke elements, which you can find online. I got these ones from Video Copilot, but you can also try
sites like Footage Crate. I then warmed up the colors
and added a blur and a glow to try and really disguise the fact that this is actually smoke. So added I added a main column of smoke from the head and one
from each side as well. And if you mask this
out into the right shape and keep the opacity low, you can really get some
nice results using smoke. So that's all the effects
built for the first shot of the Doctor realizing he's changing. So for this wide shot, we only need to build one new effect and all the others can be
reused from the previous shot. So we made a new adjustment layer and added the lens flare effect to it. You can move this around and
change the type of flare. We thought the 105
prime was the best match for what we wanted. You can change the brightness
and you can move this to match the position of each hand and a third one on the neck. Next we color corrected this whole layer so that it would look warmer. And now we can basically
add all the effects that we've already built. So we added the particles
and the radial blur. And this time with the particles, we massively increased the birth rate to make this much more of a torrent. And we also turned the
gravity down to minus 10 to make them shoot upwards. This now gave us a torrent of particles coming out of the neck,
and we could duplicate this on each of the wrists. Finally, we could add in our
smoke from the previous shot and just speed that up a bit. And that was basically our wide shot done. So using the lens flares and
the smoke and the particles and the fractal noise, you can add these effects now into as many of your
other shots as you want. And now we can revisit our
closeup transformation shot and also paste some of
these effects over the top to try and disguise it. So we added the smoke and the particles and a very bright lens flare,
just sitting under the neck. And this did a lot of the hard
work to disguise the moment when one Doctor changes into the next. Finally, to make this less static and much more harder to spot the join, we wanted to really
add some motion to this and make it shake. So we attached all our
layers to a new null object. And by ALT + clicking on stopwatch, we could use the wiggle
expression tool to add this. And if you want to learn
about the wiggle expression in more detail, check out our
window smash effect video. We also added an adjustment layer with some color correction, and we just key framed the exposure to give us some more glowing and flashing over the top of everything. And then that was all of our shots done, and it was time to see how we
did by putting them together. (dramatic music) - I don't want to go. (Doctor yells) - Oh, brilliant! - So that was our DIY method for recreating this effect from scratch. Thanks to whoever suggested this one and why not drop a comment below about what Hollywood effect you would like to see recreated next. So guys, if you enjoyed that, subscribe to the channel and you will see lots more DIY Hollywood
effects and tutorials. I've been Steve from Unexplored Films, and I will see you next time.
