How to create an animated music video scribble effect Part 1 | HitFilm tutorial

hey guys today Justin Barrett from clever tagline is going to be showing you how to create animated lines inside of hitfilm Pro and Express this effect doesn't require any add-ons so I'll let Justin take it away welcome back all you clever people just an air with clever tagline tagline mine you know that reminds me of a request that came into the hit film crew people been asking how to create animated lines in hitfilm kind of like the ones you're seeing here yeah I was all set to give you my favorite recipe for deep fried cicadas but but you know what let's let's scrap all that let's let's give the people what they really want and spend some time in hitfilm talking about the many ways you can make animated lines and better still let's give you so much stuff that it takes two weeks to cover it all what do you say I'm gonna guess you're all screaming yeah buddy so let's get started one of the core techniques were going to use is based on the tips shared by Jay Haines of the film sensei YouTube channel and Jay has kindly allowed me to show the process here start by making a new composite shot adding a black plane then dropping the light sword two-point auto effect onto the plane in the affect drop the inner glow width to zero then open the core category set the color to white feather to zero and stability to 100 set the hilt and tip position values to zero on both axes with the tip width also set to zero you'll see why in a minute then twirl open auto-scale persistence and uncheck Auto scale send motion persistence to 3x4 now distortion to zero and blend to none next at a point layer and name it drawing point back in the light short effect said both the hilt and tip controls to take their position from this point I'll set some keyframes on the point layer and we now have a line that draws through the frame and erases itself shortly after to control how long the line sticks around adjust the value on the motion persistence property for example my earlier setting of 3x means that you can draw for three frames before the line begins to erase itself if you want the line to stay a really long time crank this value up really high though be aware that large values will begin to introduce some lag in the time lines responsiveness looking at the opening shot of the band the line of following the woman's arms swing toward the end of the shot was done using this exact setup in this case the motion persistence value was set to 5x and the point driving the line was manually keyframed it to follow her hand to prevent the line from being seen too soon I adjusted the activerain to the plane layer containing the line effect you can also sculpt exactly how the line will be shaped with the show motion path option active for the viewer select your drawing point layer and you'll see a collection of tiny squares each one representing a keyframe on the selected layer if you select one of those squares or slike the keyframe marker in the timeline handles will appear that you can use to tweak the movement of the layer through that point which in turn determines the shape of the drawn line to break things up a little more to some keyframes on the hilt width property over time as I did in this example which will vary the width of the drawn line because the hilt and tip are overlapped there's no need to mess with both of their values which is why it's okay to leave the tip with at zero something else I did for this example piece but not for the shots with the band was to give the lion some random jitter this can create the impression that each frame was drawn freehand making the effect feel more organic to do this add a plane layer to the composite shot where your line is being drawn onto that plane add the fractal noise effect the only thing I did with this effect was keyframe its seed property to go from zero to a really large number by the end of the shot the number itself isn't terribly important but it does need to be large to ensure that there's a strong change between frames with this done hide the plane at a grade layer above it then add the displacement effect to the plane layer containing the line to the source to the grade layer the horizontal and vertical displacement options to luminance and then increase the displacement amounts until you're happy with how it looks in my earlier example I chose 25 pixels for both if you're planning to use this displacement option a lot i suggest moving the fractal noise plane into its own composite shot making sure to move the effect with it now you can drop that fractal noise comp into any comp that needs displacement and you won't need the grade layer because you can directly target that comp with a displacement effect because we're going to use this modified lead sort effect a lot in this series I recommend saving it as a preset to do so select the effect right click on it choose create preset then give it a name and tell hitfilm where to save it I made one earlier called line drawing and put it in the 2d effects folder now let's look at how to take this technique up a notch before we do that though I want to make the list of elements in my media tab a little more condensed to do that I'm going to change from preview mode to list mode with that done let's start in the accents folder which contains the smaller accents mostly used in the opening and closing shots I knew these accents would be used a lot so I built each one in its own composite shot and made them fairly large so they'd work at various sizes as you can see with the straight line accent in this case there are three letter line drawing effects on a single plane all set up like I showed earlier with each one controlled by a different point layer I also animated the line thickness over time though in this case I set keyframes on the core width property of each effect whether you do this or keyframe the hilt width the end result is pretty much the same the wavy lines coming from the guitar player were made in the same way though instead of key framing the vertical motion directly on the three drawing point layers I used a parent point layer to move the three drawing points up and down for the bass player I wanted to create some radiating lines as he plucked the strings so I set aside the light sword for a moment and went with a different approach I began with a new composite shot dropped my plane into it use the fill color effect to make it white and scaled it to create a horizontal bar above that I added a grade layer on to which I drop to the polar warp effect which turned the bar into a circular band I then reduced the polar warps range property to 45 to turn the band into a partial arc and enemy to the bar moving upwards from the bottom of the frame over 15 frames using a manual bezzie a keyframe at his highest position to ease it into place I then dropped this comp into a new cob added my black plane below it and a grade layer above it on the grade layer I first added the posterized effect setting smooth sorts to 35 colors per channel - - and smooth 2.09 which rounded off the hard edges of the arc then I added the echo effect setting echo time to minus point zero eight number of echoes - - and decay to 0.57 which created a couple of faded echoes shortly behind the original with the accents finished I pre-rendered all three and then it was time to sync them with the video because the camera tilts up at the beginning of the shot I wanted the accents to track with the camera movement to do this I used hit films 2d tracking to track the microphone in the center of the frame and to plant the track to a point layer name to track point to learn more about tracking in hitfilm click the card in the upper right corner I started by sinking the straight line acts into the woman's finger snaps after finding a frame where a snap begins I dropped the accent on the timeline on the proper frame set its blend mode to add then moved rotated and scaled it into place I then parented this accident layer to the track point so that it would follow the camera movement for the next accent I duplicated the first one then tweaked its timing position and rotation to match the next finger snap this process was repeated for the final snap and then I began sinking the accents for each of the other musicians following the same basic process as a final touch to help ground these accents in the scene a little more but chose to have the other scene elements obscure them like the moment of the final shot when the guitar player walks in front of the bass player this was done by creating a mask on the accident layer to represent the obscuring shape cooking this icon to invert the mask activating keyframes on the masks position rotation and path properties and animating the mask over time now let's move on to the animated notes like the other accents each note was made in its own composite shot and created fairly large looking at the half note as an example I've got the custom line drawing effect on a plane this time with motion persistence set to 50x to assure that the note stays around long enough to get the shape the way I wanted it I use the technique I mentioned earlier to sculpt the points motion using the on-screen handles available for each keyframe for the quarter in eighth notes I also added a second plain layer that had the fill color effect to make it white and a mask to create the filled center of the note to expand this Center shape I set keyframes on the expansion property for the mask adding the notes of the first and last shots was done similar to adding the other accents you along with sitting scale property keyframes after writing them so they scale up as they're being drawn I also wanted them to drift up and out a frame in a wavy fashion to achieve this I set two position keyframes on each note one where the nose starts and another 40 frames later with the note outside the frame straight above the first with the first keyframe set to manual busy a so the upward movement has some acceleration once all the notes for a given shot were roughly animated like this I selected all the note layers right clicked and chose make composite shot inside that nested composite shot I added a grade layer above the notes then added the waves effect to this grade I set amplitude to six frequency to four and angle to 180 now as the notes drift up they move through the wave the final piece we'll look at it in part one is the collection of animated lines radiating across the guitar strings in the third shot this also uses the light sword effect though not the way we've been using it so far in this case I only turned off the glow set the core color to white the hilt and tip width to 10 pixels and the blend to none if it turned off the set matte effect on this layer you can see there are six lines matching the six guitar strings each one is a separate light sword effect and each one has been hand tracked to match the strings that's the tricky part but because I knew I'd only be showing the lines for brief moments as the qataris strum the strings I was able to speed up the process just a little once I had the lines tracked it was time to make what would become a mass source for these lines I made a new composite shot with dimensions set to 2048 by 2048 and the time set to match my other comp length in this composite shot I made a new plane with dimensions of 2048 by 150 been added the color gradient effect to it setting blend to normal opacity to 100% and the start and end point properties set with both X values at 0 the y start at negative 75 and the y end at 75 which made the gradient exactly fill the plane next I've rotated the plane 45 degrees and set its anchor point to 75 on the y axis to turn this into a diamond I added a grade layer at the top of the stack and to reflection effects to this grade with the angle on the first one set to 90 and the second one set to minus 180 I then copied the video from the other composite shot pasted it into this one and use that as reference for animating the plane each time the players strung the strings I set the first keyframe with the plane at the center of the frame the second one 11 frames later with the plane a little more than halfway to the upper right corner then set the keyframes to manual bezzie a and pull the handles in slightly I then copied and pasted these position keyframes to match the timing of the other strumming motions you I also decided that I wanted the gradient to be whiter near the center and more narrow at its widest point so I added scale keyframes to the plane you back in my main composite shot I added this comp at the bottom of the stack and turned off its visibility on the plane containing the lines I added the set mat effect sitting the source to my radiating diamond composite shot mat source to luminance blend to subtract and invert checked I then positioned rotated and scaled the diamond comp to match the first strum with the comps Center roughly in the center of the guitars sound hole I then activated keyframes for position and rotation and roughly tracked the layer to follow the guitar as it moved again focusing on those few frames when the radiating diamond made the string lines visible to have the guitarist hand obscure these lines as he strummed I began by dropping in another copy of my full plane placing it below the video footage I then added a very rough mask loosely matching the shape of the hand said it's feather property to 10 pixels to soften the edge a bit and inverted the mask I placed a great layer above it then opened each of the light short effects and chose this grade layer as the mask source under the Corps property category this meant that each line used that mass to cut off a space where the hand was while the set mat effect drove the visibility of the Lions as an entire group I then keyframe that mask over the course of the shot to match the hand of the key points when it obscured the moving lines that's where we'll wrap things up for part 1 of this series keep your eyes peeled for part 2 to see how the other line effects were created including a technique for rotoscoping that works in both hitfilm Pro and Xpress until next time clever tag line if you liked this tutorial be sure to subscribe for part 2 coming later this month leave any questions down below and thanks for watching

Channel: FXhome

Views: 31,526

Keywords: HitFilm, HitFilm Pro, HitFilm Express, VFX, editing, software, video software, video editing, visual effects, drawn lines music video, line rider, music video, scribble effect, after effects, scribble, music video drawing effect, drawing effect, scribble effect after effects, scribble effect hitfilm, music video scribble effect, animated drawing effect, how to, music video effects, music video editing, scribble animation, bruno mars, music video tutorial, animated drawn lines

Id: 42osCqiNaUQ

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 06 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/mrphilipjoel]

Good Lord this app can do so much.