- Hey guys, Steve from
Unexplored Films here and today we're going to
try and film me walking through a magic portal
into another location, just like Marvel's "Doctor Strange". Today's video is sponsored by our friends at ProductionCrate, a
fantastic all-in-one assets hub for your filmmaking. So stick around to see how
they massively helped us with this video. So this is another really
fun superhero-style effect and although various people have tried portal effects before, they usually try it in
two different shots, one walking in and one walking out. So just like with our window smash video, we were trying to see if we
could pull off this effect in what looks like a single unedited take by using a handheld camera
following the character directly through the portal and into
the other physical location. So as usual, we're trying
to do a lot with a little and prove that you don't
always need a big budget to get some really creative
filmmaking effects. And if you're enjoying these DIY Hollywood effects and tutorials, please consider subscribing and you'll get to see lots and lots more. And thanks for all the amazing support so far for this channel. So to begin this effect,
we needed two locations and we used a garden and a nearby field, and we're going to make
it look like I walk from one into the other. We used a light stand with
some markers on the top to represent where the portal will be and having something clear
like this is really important because it will help the
software to track the scene in 3D space. So the first thing we
filmed in the garden, our first location, was me
walking into place and miming creating the portal with my hands as if I have some magic powers. We then filmed me walking
towards the light stand and the camera follows. The camera picks up speed and gets closer to my shoulder just as we're
passing the light stand. And we figured somewhere around there, we could hopefully do a hidden cut to me in the second location. Once we had to take we thought would work. We took the light stand away and filmed two extra shots, a view of the empty
garden with no light stand and a view with the camera spinning round, showing where it had come from. Next, we headed to our second location and blocked some action
to match the same movement so the camera would move
forward through the field and then I would appear on one side in pretty much the same
place as the previous shot. Then I would spin round and try and get back through the portal, but it closes up before I can. It actually started to rain at this point, and we thought this would
be quite a funny end to the effect. So that was everything we needed to film. And now it was time to begin editing. So we built this effect
in Adobe After Effects and the first thing we did was to line up our two favorite
takes next to each other, just to roughly work out
the timings of the shot. Now, because the portal's going
to have to appear behind me, another way we could've done this effect would have been to use a big green screen, but it would have been a
bigger object to try and remove so we decided to try the rotoscope tool. We use the After Effects beta version, which as of October, 2020, you still need to use in
order to get the rotoscope 2, the best version of the rotoscope tool. And using that, we cut me
out from the background, what this will do, if you select the area you
want is it will go through and analyze your footage and
try and recognize that area as it moves. You can hit the freeze button and it will freeze everything in place so that it won't keep changing. So next of course, we needed
to add our portal effect. So rather than trying to
build the portal ourselves, we headed over to our
sponsor, ProductionCrate, where they have some amazing
pre-made portal effects. We love ProductionCrate. You'll have seen their effects used in some of our previous videos. And they are such a useful
production resource for us with our DIY Hollywood effects videos. They have a huge library of
pre-keyed visual effects assets, as well as sound effects and music, and it's all under one
affordable subscription. And they also provide lots
of free options as well if you just want to create
a basic account with them. And if you sign up using
our link below this video, they will know we sent you and it helps us out a little bit too. So for our portal effect, we found this in the magic
powers selection of the site, and it was in a separate
category called Strange Effects, because it's based on the
portals from "Doctor Strange". And we use this one called 'spark portal', and we combined it with
'spark portal generation' to show the beginning and
'spark portal dissipation' to show the ending. So now we can drop in our
ProductionCrate portal effect over our footage. And of course, because
of the rotoscoped layer, the character can appear on top. So next we have to attach the
portal to the tracking markers that we've got on the light stands so it will move in 3D space
as if it's really there. So for this, we selected our original take
with the light stand visible and went over to our tracker panel and selected track camera. This then analyzes the scene using the 3D tracker camera tool and gives you a series of track points. And as we had hoped, at least three of these were
stuck to our tracking markers on the light stand. If you hold down shift, you can select the ones you want, and then you can right click and select create null and camera. Now we need to create the hole in the shot that's going to be visible
through the portal. So for this, we created a new solid and placed it above the
original shot in the timeline and turned on the 3D layer. Next, we can highlight
the transform properties of the null object and copy and paste them onto the solid layer. And now when we play this through, the solid layer is
sticking to the light stand in exactly the same place. We now use the anchor point
controls and the scale to make this slightly larger
and cover the whole stand so that it would allow
enough room for our portal. Next, we use the ellipse tool
to create an ellipse mask on the solid. We selected our original shot underneath and changed the track mat
setting to alpha inverted matte, based on our ellipse layer above. This then it cuts a hole in your shot in the shape of your ellipse. So now we can drop our portal layer from ProductionCrate in on top and we had a slightly
better result changing the blend mode to screen. Now we could turn on the
portal layer's 3D settings, scale it up to a better
size and just like the hole, it should stick to the
same camera movement. And we could now adjust our hole to match the size of the
portal and also key frame the size and the feather at the beginning when the portal is created. This way, we got a nice
soft edge at the beginning where we will see our
second location appearing. So now we have our portal being created, but we still need to get
rid of the light stand that we used to do the tracking. And this is why when we did the filming, we got that extra shot of
the garden without the stand. So we could now bring in this
empty shot of the garden, make it 3D and once again,
attach it to the track null. We now scaled this up
and made it the same size and just drew a little mask
around the area that we needed. So as long as your camera
doesn't move at the beginning, nobody will notice. But as soon as it starts
moving in 3D space, you might have a bit of a
problem with part of the garden stuck on top of the light frame. And of course, we're not going to see
this because of the portal. So now we have to add our second location and we started just by
dropping this shot in behind, just to see what it would look like. We also needed to find a way of getting from our rotoscoped figure in the garden to our physical figure in the field, just to the point where
the figures overlap. So we started by scaling
our rotoscoped figure up a little bit, to make it match the size, and then tried out a few blending ideas between the two figures. Because the angle of the head didn't match in our two takes, we actually found a moment
where I turned my head in the second shot and cut this out and reversed it in order to link the two shots together. In the end, we obscured
this change slightly by adding a new adjustment layer, and then the turbulent displace, which you can also see in our ghost walking
through a door effect. By key framing the
amount and the evolution, we could make everything
go a little bit wobbly as the camera looks like it
moves through the portal. We also added the lumetri
color to the adjustment layer with the turbulent displace
and warmed everything up so that it would feel
a bit like a heatwave. And we disguised things further by adding some real fire elements, which once again were from ProductionCrate and this really helped disguise that fairly sketchy change
between those two shots. So now we had to try and
match the camera movement of the second shot that you
can see through the portal with the first shot of the garden as the camera begins its move. But we wanted it to look
like it was sticking to the furthest point in the frame, which would be the fence, rather than the motion
trackers on the stand. So instead of relying
on our 3D camera track, we did a basic 2D camera
track using some points on the fence. So we did this with a track motion button to track the motion of the original take and then created a new null
object from that track, which attached itself
to our fence movement. This meant that we can
now parent our field layer to that null object, and it's now basically
attached itself to the fence. Because we hadn't really
timed how long the walk took or how far it was in both locations, they were a little bit different. So we simply used a freeze
frame of the second location until the first location starts moving. And at that point we started the move. So this just now left the
last part of the effect where I see the original
location disappear through the portal once
I'm standing in the field. So to build this, we repeated the whole process of doing a 3D camera
track in the location. And we picked out our favorite
tracking points on the floor, just next to where my foot stops. Once again, we created a solid,
made it an elliptical mask, and added the portal back in on top. Then we went back and
found that extra shot that we'd got in the garden
where the camera spins round and you see the location that I'm leaving. And this was a pretty good match for the camera movement
in the second location. We could then drop this shot
in, visible through the portal, and make it look like it closes up. We once again use the rotoscope tool to remove me from the background. Finally, we went back to ProductionCrate to look for some more finishing touches, and we found this great magic beam and some smoke effects
and things like that to add into the beginning as I'm creating the portal with my hands. We also used some of ProductionCrate's amazing
real weather elements to increase the joke at the end, where I am now stuck in a place where it's pouring with rain. Finally, this just left some sound design and it was time to look
back at the finished effect. "No, no, no, no!" (thunder rumbling) So that was our method for recreating this effect. And why not drop a comment below about what Hollywood effect you would
like to see recreated next. So guys, I hope you enjoyed that. Please give it a like and
hit that subscribe button if you enjoyed this. I've been Steve from Unexplored Films and I'll see you next time.
