How to Create a Glitch Effect in After Effects

glitching ain't easy actually it can be today we're going to create a glitch effect template that will work with any image or video hi i'm nick greenwald motion designer online teacher and all-around chill guy have you ever been hacked or maybe you're the one doing the hacking either way glitch effects like this are very popular in today's cyber world so in this tutorial we're going to make this glitch effect that you can set up once and then drop over any footage the great thing about this template is that we're going to have some control over the variables once we set it up once you create it you can make your glitch as subtle or chaotic as you'd like here's what we're going to learn how to add distortion using a displacement map how to shift color channels set up sliders to change these effects easily building a reusable glitch template make sure to check out the link in the description and you can snag the project files that will help you get the most out of this lesson let's check it out [Music] to get started i'm going to drop in my source image this can be whatever you want an image video text whatever i'm going to use this school of motion logo we can go ahead and pre-compose this stuff call this composition source so now that this image is pre-composed we can change whatever is inside this composition in the future without messing up our effect okay so now we want to create some distortion which is going to drive this glitch effect and we want this distortion or noise to be on a new layer so that we can reference it in the future easily with an adjustment layer so let's make a new solid call this noise make it the size of our comp color doesn't matter okay we're gonna add an effect called fractal noise cool so let's set the type to block and bump up the contrast a little bit to give it some defined shapes and i'm going to open up the transform properties here and uncheck uniform scaling this way i can stretch out the width like this so it gets real nice and wide that's good and let's scroll down to the evolution options and this is what we want right here random seed you can see if i scroll through this it starts to dance like this now we want to kind of automate this right here so i'm going to alt click on this random seed stopwatch and type in a little expression time times and then we can type in whatever number we want let's say 15. so now if i press play you can see this is just running through this random seeds the higher number you type in the faster it's going to cycle lower number slower the change great now let's go ahead and hide this noise layer you can see nothing's happening that's okay let's make something happen we're going to right click make a new adjustment layer and add a displacement map now we want this displacement map to target our noise layer and we also want to click here where it says source and we want to use the effects and masks on our noise layer too and we also want to set this to luminance so that it targets the black and white values if we press play here you can see what's starting to happen now we can mess with the horizontal and vertical displacement to really kind of make this effect look a lot crazier but i don't really like how kind of sharp this effect is starting to look so i think that i want to go back on my noise layer and make it look a little blockier so i'm going to add an effect on this layer called mosaic so we can tweak the amount of blocks in here and it's a little bit hard to see the results of what's actually happening so let's go ahead and turn off our noise layer turn back on our adjustment layer and then with this adjustment layer on we can tweak the amount of blocks in here until we get something that we like and we can just play around with this and we can always come back to it later and i'm also going to go ahead and just rename this layer displacement map just to keep things nice and tidy [Music] now another aspect of glitches is the separation of red green and blue values also known as chromatic aberration since all the colors on a screen are made up of rgmb when you are getting hacked or doing some hacking your rgm b go crazy come on this is hollywood hacking 101. so let's make a new adjustment layer by right-clicking new adjustment layer and we're going to add an effect called shift channels so what we want to do here is we want to turn off all of the colors except for red so let's click where it says green click full off blue full off there we go and we'll come down here to the blending mode and set this to lighten great now it looks like nothing's happening but we're gonna get there again and why don't we rename this layer to be shift red and we can even set this little uh layer color tag to red also it will help us visually identify it in the future let's help out future us now we want to do also is duplicate this layer two more times and do it for the other colors so i'm gonna click control or command d to duplicate it once more we'll call this to be shift green change the little color tag to be green and turn off red and turn on green do it once more for blue change the color tag to blue name it blue turn off green turn on blue so really looks like nothing's happening here so let's make something happen what i want to do is i also want to add a transform effect so now with this transform effect on here if i move the position on this layer you can see that i am shifting the blue here but i want this to feel a little more random like we said in the beginning so if i alt click on the position of this transform effect and type in a little wiggle expression start typing in wiggle with open parentheses and it will also autofill here and then we can type in two numbers so let's say three comma ten this will mean wiggle three times per second 10 pixels like this if we press play this is what's happening and if we copy this transform effect we can paste it on our other two layers and they will also now have the wiggle cool [Music] but you know looking at this i don't think i'm happy with the way that these things are all wiggling around and i think i want a little more control over all these properties so let's make a controller i'm going to right click create a new null object and i'm going to name this controller did you guess it and let's add some slider controls to this layer search for slider control and let's add one and we're going to duplicate this clicking here and click ctrl d or command d on mac now we have two slider controls we're gonna name the first one to be frequency by clicking enter rename and the second one to be amplitude great now what i'm going to do is i'm going to open up the expressions that we put down on these layers i'm going to highlight these layers double click e on the keyboard to reveal the expressions let me give myself a little more room here and if i click onto my controller layer i can lock this panel up here by clicking the lock button okay and so if i grab one of the numbers the first number on my wiggle expression here this 3 i'm going to pick whip and attach it to the frequency slider like this and i will do the same with the 10 the second number pick whip it to my second slider the amplitude slider like this and if you do this and you get this little error here all that you need to do is add a closing parenthesis to your line like this just close the expression out and you should fix your error so now we can do is we can actually control this transform expression using these sliders isn't that neat so i'm going to copy this expression now if i right click on the position here copy expression only and i will paste it onto my other two shift layers like this just ctrl or command v to paste it and i'll also why don't i open up my displacement map here and do the same onto my horizontal displacement first i'm going to zero it out so that the zero matches the zero on my sliders and then paste it onto here cool so now we can just animate these sliders any kind of animation we want on here and it'll affect all of these layers so why don't i just go ahead and do this now create a glitch animation on the sliders and make some kind of cool glitch animation to happen and i don't want to bore you as i put down some key frames so i'm actually going to hack the space time continuum and travel forward very quickly and this is a skill that you can learn once you get really good at hacking like me okay so i made a little glitch animation but one thing i'm not happy with is how linked certain things are for example the horizontal displacement it's not being as exaggerated as i want compared to how much these layers are shifting so what i'm going to do is i'm going to add another slider onto this controller layer that's going to work as a multiplier so i'll show you what i'm talking about if i add another slider control onto here and let me just call this multiplier now what i'll do is on this expression on our displacement map i'm going to add at the end of this line a times sign multiply and then pick whip to this multiplier so now what this will do is any number i put into this multiplier will multiply this entire preview expression times the multiplier so let me go where there's a little bit of keyframe action happening and now if i start to crank this number up a little bit you can see now it is multiplying by this number cool and i can do the same thing with the other expressions here but i can just do different multipliers for example if i want this to be a little bit different but unless i could do plus this multiplier or i could do minus this multiplier like this and this can just really help you now add a little bit of variety to your different layer properties so now let me just go in and just tweak my animation a little bit add some of this multiplier throw some keyframes down on it and let's see what kind of animation we can come up with and once again i'm going to hack space time and do this very quickly and do not try this at home i am a professional alright so i think this is looking pretty good i think the multiplier helped a lot and i'm pretty happy with this [Music] so now that we have a glitch effect that we are happy with let's clean all of this up a little bit and make it an easy template that we can reuse in the future so personally i don't like all these layers stacked here i'm clicking u to hide and show all of my keyframes by the way so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take all of these layers and i'm going to pre-compose them grabbing everything except for my source comp and i'm just going to right click pre-compose let's call this glitch effect it's important to get really clever with your names so now if i play through this oh no the effect is gone what have we done well no worries if we click the continuously rasterize button all of our adjustment layers and everything are going to still affect anything that's below them so no worries here but now the issue is that if we want to keep working on this glitch we have to click into this comp and and edit these sliders in here and that's going to be kind of a pain because we can't see what we're working on and we have to keep clicking back and forth so what can we do let's figure it out so if we click back into our comp what we can do is we can actually copy these sliders control control c copy them go back into our main comp and let's just paste them onto our source composition you can click u to reveal everything and make sure just confirm that it actually pasted onto here and great and so now with this composition selected i'm going to lock these effect controls up here click back into my glitch effect and i'm just going to delete all of these keyframes here and with this controller layer selected let me just pick whip these sliders onto the sliders on the source comp like this so now what should happen is everything in this glitch effect comp should be re-linked to the sliders on this main composition like this so now anything we want to work on in here we can just do it all on this outer source composition and any changes we want to make we can just do them out here and it will update inside the main composition so now to update the contents of this glitch all you got to do is go into your source here and you can just drag right in a new source image contents whatever and your glitch will just apply right on top so from here you can either just work directly into this template that we made and make new glitches or you could save this project file and import it into another and use it as a glitch template and that's really all there is folks and there we go look at this awesome glitch effect we made we created some nice distortion shifted color channels and even attached all these properties to sliders so we could easily control them in the future and if you want to take your motion skills even further why not advance your knowledge of automation with expression session where zack and null will teach you how to approach write and implement expressions in after effects if you want to learn more ways to improve make sure to subscribe to this channel and hit the bell icon so you'll be notified when we drop the next tip thanks for watching goodbye [Music] you

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 38,012

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph

Id: qSakY6yzHVc

Length: 17min 46sec (1066 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020