- Hey guys, Steve from
Unexplored Films here and today we're going
to try and add me into some stock footage to
demonstrate how you can massively increase your
production value on a budget. Now we all know stock
footage is a great way to increase your production value easily, but who says you just need
to use the shots as they are, once they are licensed to you to use, you can color grade, reverse clips or composite them together with other elements to
really make them your own. And that's what we tried in our latest experiment. We tried adding me into
several stock clips in order to show that they can be
used in some creative ways to add production value to your story. And once you start seeing
stock footage as just one more building block
instead of feeling, like you just have to
use it as you found it, you can really start to have some fun. So like a lot of the
experiments we try this is just one more method of how to make your film on a budget. And if you're enjoying
these DIY Hollywood effects and tutorials, be sure to subscribe to the channel and you'll see lots and lots more. Now because we needed lots of
stock footage for this video, it is sponsored by our friends at Artgrid, a fantastic subscription-based
stock footage site, which offers unlimited
downloads for one simple license and one monthly fee. So far, I'm pretty impressed with them because they've got lots of
high quality, well-shot clips. And if you use our link below this video to sign up to Artgrid, you
can get two extra months. So the first thing we did was to look through Artgrid to
find some great stock shots that I could interact with. The obvious ones were
shots that could be used as a view that I could be looking at. And our plan was to film our new elements
against a green screen. The first one was a pretty basic idea of me dressed as a hiker
looking at a landscape with a sunset, we have the original
clips cued up on a laptop off to one side. And the trick with all these clips was to move our studio lights around and recreate the lighting
scene in the clip. So for the low sun in the
shot with this landscape, we used a softbox in the corner with a warm color temperature
and I simply walked into frame with a backpack
and had to look around as if I was in a landscape. Because we knew we would have a lot of color correcting to do
to match the stock clips, we were careful to shoot
our new elements in log, which gave us flatter
colors and more information than a standard picture profile would. If you open the stock clip
in your editing program and drop in your newly
shot elements on top, you can then remove the green
screen and start to refine it. If you're using Premiere, you can use the Ultra Key effect and if you're using After Effects, you can use Keylight. We used After Effects and
if you want to learn how to use Keylight in more detail, head over to our tutorial on
how to add yourself to movies because we used exactly the
same process in this experiment. Once we had refined the
key as best as we could, we then used the Lumetri color to try and match our colors to the colors in the original footage. To integrate the character in
the scene a little bit more, We also copied and pasted
some of the rock texture and put it slightly in
front of the character and added a blur. Finally, if you parent or nest
all of your layers together, you can then add some camera movement to the whole thing and
it will look less static. So this first experiment
looking at the view, worked fairly well. So then we thought about
some other ways that a view could be presented. For our next test we wanted to try a view visible through a window. And for this we selected
this shot of a field and some sky. Then we set up a green
screen outside a real window and simply filmed the
element inside of me walking towards the window and
looking at the view. Once this was done, we could use the same process as before to remove the green screen and simply add in our footage. And another good trick to make it look like something's appearing
through a window is to add a white solid
between the two layers and turn the opacity really low to something like 10%. This will make everything
behind it a little fainter and a bit less contrasty. With some masking to remove the top parts of the window that the
green screen couldn't reach. And with a fake camera
movement added once again, we were able to create
a pretty decent version of a new view appearing out of the window. Pretty soon we realized
we could use moving clips as views seen from modes of transport. So we used this clip
here as the background to be seen from a train. For this we simply added a chair in front of our green screen, lowered the camera to head
height and adjusted the lighting to match this new clip. Then we could film me seated
as if I was on a train and add the background in behind. One good tip is if you're only
finishing your edits in HD, you can download the 4K
versions of these clips from Artgrid. And this will give you
much more room quality-wise if you want to zoom in and add some artificial camera movement. Another trick we used here was to create a focus pull
between the background and the foreground as if you were filming this for real on quite a close up lens, you probably wouldn't be able to keep all of it in focus anyway. To do this, we simply added the
Gaussian blur to both layers and keyframed it from
zero to a high amount and then keyframed it in
the opposite direction on the other layer, and we started adding these
fake focus pulls into several of our other shots as well. Once again, adding an artificial
camera movement to the whole shot really helped. And you might want to
add an adjustment layer or a lens flare or something to the entire shot over all the layers to make everything below it look a little bit more consistent. We tried a similar
experiment to our train view with this shot taken from a plane window. For this scene we dimmed
the lighting very low to feel more like a plane at night when it's coming into land. Once again, we could film
this seated on the chair. And this was just a simple head turn to look at the view
with a stock still image of part of a plane window. We then keyframed my head in
the window slightly larger and slightly to one side so that it appeared like the
camera was moving past me to look out the window. This method of course, gets you so much more control than if you actually attempted
to this shot on a real plane, because you can move every
element where you want it to be. And of course, you don't need to worry about window reflections. Once again we added our fake focus pull at the beginning of this shot, and it just draws your
eyes to the correct parts of this frame. For a third experiment of a
shot seen through the window of a vehicle, we decided to use this shot of the earth and make it look like I was actually in a space station. We found another clip
that provided the window and we simply cut this out in Photoshop and I pretended to float around in front of the green screen by just moving slowly. Once we composited these layers together. I could also add some
rotation and extra movement to really make me look weightless. And like I was coming
into the shot slightly from one side. We added a simple cutout
of a pen floating past and just keyframed the movement and the blur to establish
the idea that this was zero gravity so that
you're not surprised when you see me floating. Once again, we did a fake
focus pull when I got towards the window and added a lens flare over all the elements to
really tie the scene together. For our next experiment, we tried using some clips
with people in them. We found this shot of a
businessman thinking and decided to try and add me in next to
him doing something similar. For this once again, the challenge was matching
the lighting coming from the windows behind, but also matching the slight movement that the camera does. Because the camera is slowly
circling around the man, we worked out a budget version of this would be getting
me to very slowly turn on the spot so that it
would look like the camera was moving around me
and the move is so slow that you can't really tell that the light is not changing position. Then we did a simple motion
tracking after effects on the window frame which was moving at about the right speed, and we could parent my
layer to the window frame. This meant that I was moving at exactly
the same speed as the man in the original clip. We tried one more shot with a person. They static clip of a businessman
approaching the camera and looking out the
window and decided to try an actor replacement just
like in our video on how to add yourself to movies. So for this we once again
tried matching the lighting, which in this case was a
very harsh light coming in from the right and not much light from the left. And then I performed a similar move to the original actor of
walking towards the camera and looking out the window. Then we could load up the
original clip and After Effects and save freeze frames
when the actor moved and recreate the background
in Photoshop either manually or by using Content-Aware Fill. Next, we could drop in
my new performance on top color correct to match
the original footage. And the finishing touch was
once again a subtle focus pull to make the background become
a little bit more blurry as I approached the camera. So hopefully these examples show that you can get really creative when using stock footage. It doesn't always have
to be the end result. It can be a building block
to get you the shot you want. You can use them as
backgrounds, shots from windows or even replace the actor in them. And this is just one more way to massively boost your production value without leaving home. And if you regularly need a lot of stock clips for your films but you really want to
keep the budget consistent, you should definitely check out Artgrid and don't forget to get
your two extra months, if you sign up using our link below. So guys, if you enjoyed that,
subscribe to the channel and you will see lots more
effects and tutorials. I've been Steve from Unexplored Films and I'll see you next time.
