MAP ZOOM Effect - Breakdown/Tutorial

and let's make one thing very clear I do not live in the most exciting place in the world [Music] South Carolina may not have the tourism or social media presence of Hawaii that Iceland but that doesn't mean it's not worth sharing today's the day the map zoom out effect whatever you want to call it breakdown tutorial it's happening this has got to be the most requested video that I've ever made the number of comments that gotten asking to make this video is honestly preposterous just the number of comments like I haven't duplicated any of these I haven't repeated any of these are all individual comments it's ridiculous I will clarify before we jump into this that this is more of a breakdown than a tutorial the big reason for that is basically just that this effect took me about seven eight hours to put together so it's not really something that I can go start from scratch do it again and show you exactly the process to recreate it but I am gonna go through frame by frame show you pretty much everything that went into this I kind of just break down the entire effect into all the little details and how I put it together so the first part of this effect is made out of three drone shots basically I started directly above me got that drone shot moved up a bit to have a wider angle got that shot and then moved up two more times and captured two more even wider angles eventually maxing out the drones 400 foot limit for how high I can fly then I basically just took all four of those videos drop the opacity to 50% and use that to scale position rotate line them up as needed so if we start here we can see we've got the closest drone shot right here and after effects this is the shot where you can see me I'm actually gonna drop the render resolution to half so this can render a bit faster do be warned before you watch this video my computer does not appreciate rendering through this project file in after-effects this is a very very render intensive composition then after that we've got this middle angle the drone where it's not too wide but it's not like right on my face like that first one so we can see we've got that medium one which is then lined up with the first one and you can see here that there's an artifact from lining it up like that which is that my car has four side mirrors maybe it's a good design that a car manufacturer should be paying more attention to I don't know then after that it just keeps going we've got the third drone shot right here and finally the final super wide drone shot after that and you can see this fourth drone shot looks a little bit weird and that's because I hate to break it to you but the effect that you see in the video is even more fake than just visual effects because I actually covered up my location obviously I didn't want to Doc's myself by showing you exactly where I live on a map so what I did was I took the first Google Earth screen shot right here and this if you see here I can turn off the drone shot and it's not where I live at all so basically to blend this in you can see I've done a few different things obviously the drone shot is masked to kind of cover up the edges as best as I could and then after that I just took a few different layers and covered up masked out different things on that drone shot or not the drone shot the Google Earth image the screen shot there to cover that off so you can just see there's a few different spots here that I've masked out and then put them back over the drone shot to help blend it in I'm hoping that by showing you that first little bit there that'll cover up some of the misconceptions that I've seen in comments speculating about how I created this effect the first of which is that the drone is moving up you can see here the drone it doesn't move at all because I was going for a zoom out effect and the advantage to not moving the drone and instead taking multiple shots with it and compositing them together in post is one just that you get a smoother animation and to that I can animate it completely on my own without any need to track the drone shot so that it lines up with the Google Earth screenshots so that even though this is a super time extensive effect that saved me a ton of time in the final edit taking the motion of the drone and matching it up with the animation to get it to look like he kept going at a consistent pace would just be obnoxiously difficult so I'm glad I didn't have to do that and the other big misconception I saw was a lot of people trying to find where the transition is between the drone shot and the Google Earth screenshots and you can see here there is no transition this first clip all the way down at the bottom this close-up of me you can see if you watch through the entire thing it stays there the entire time of course eventually it's gonna basically disappear because it gets so small that you can't see it but there's no point where there's like a fade or a luma fade to go between the drone shot and the Google Earth screenshots it's all there the entire time completely composited together into one image that's for the screenshots I basically just went on Google Maps and I would take a screenshot of this location zoom out a bit take another and just kept going until I had about 10 images I believe in total then what I did was basically just composite those together in the exact same way that I did with the drone shots if we keep going here you can see I would basically just drop the opacity to 50% and use that to line these up and since there's screenshots that are all taken from the same angle and zoomed in instead of the camera actually moving this ended up being a good bit easier than lining up the drone shots and trying to not have any seams there basically if we keep going you can see we end up at a wider spot here and then after that there's yet another screenshot composited in and it basically just keeps going until we get to the entire state of South Carolina and every single one of these layers is basically just lined up like that and then parented to the same layer so if I scale or change the position of that one layer it changes all of them and that's basically the backbone of the entire animation at a certain point we get to this part of the video where it transitions from those screenshots to the actual map on my phone in my car and the way I did that was basically just the exact same thing once again taking those images and lining them up by dropping the opacity I've got this kind of interesting animation here to take it from the screenshots to the kind of white map where it shows you the different roads and what I did there was I just took that screenshot lined it up the same way I did with everything else and then I used this circular mask so if I turn off the luma key you can see here there's just a circular mask that's expanding out and that kind of reveals the roads in this way that looks like they're kind of I don't know like slithering growing across the image then I've basically just duplicated that layer remove the luma key and then faded it back in to switch completely from the screenshots to the actual map with the roads and as for going from that screenshot to my phone it's once again pretty much the same thing had the map opened on my phone and lined it up with the actual screen but as you can see here I didn't like transition from the screenshots to the actual screen on my phone what I did was instead if I turn off all these effects here basically what I did was mask out all of the parts of the phone screen that I wanted to keep and then composited the screenshots behind that so that would just have a clear image on the phone screen since it is zoomed in so much on the phone at the start here and then I just color corrected it to match a little bit so that the whites would match because my phone kind of had that yellow color to the screen because of the white balance and the lighting the brightness of my screen etc and the final thing I did to bring in that phone animation was animate in this little red marker to pop up my basically just animated the scale use some keyframe interpolation to bring that up if you are daring enough to try this effect out for yourself you're gonna end up with a crazy animation where it scales out very slowly at the beginning and speeds up and ends up super fast at the end but the one thing you can do to super easily fix that is just go to the layer where the animation is I believe it's this one then if I open up the scale property there and we go to the graph editor I basically just selected my keyframes right click them and then selected exponential scale and you can see that changes it to where it goes a lot faster at the beginning and then slows down towards the end and it basically just calculates it and after-effects does the work for you to make it so that the animation appears to be scaling at the same rate throughout the entire clip pretty cool effects and that is the bulk of the animation behind the effect but there's also plenty of things I did after that to kind of just smooth it out and make it look more realistic so for example if you see here we can go to the spot where it's kind of the seam between the drone shot and the Google Earth screenshots you can see I've just added a color correction adjustment layer over the entire Google Earth section to match the color of the grass to the color that's present in the drone shot another thing I saw that a few people had noticed in the comments section on the original video was that there's a truck passing on the road and that road isn't part of the drone shot it's part of that Google Earth screen shot and basically I just masked out this car right here and this truck and then animated them to move as the cameras going up then finally I just added some motion blur enabled that for the layers that's absolutely essential for having a realistic effect and I just pre composed the entire thing and used the wiggle expression and After Effects to make the position a little bit randomized and add a bit of camera shake to make it more realistic it's the little details like that like the truck moving in the shot and color correcting all the clips to match adding a little bit of camera shake and of course motion blur those little details that you put on at the end just using that extra little bit of time on the shot it's gonna be absolutely essential for getting a realistic effect finally just slap a final color grade on the entire thing and we are finished you think I'm clapping because we're done and that's exciting but no I just forgot to line up the audio earlier so I'm doing it now um no that is pretty cool that they've done so I hope that you've enjoyed this video learned something from it and if you did and you want to go try this out for yourself spend those seven eight hours creating this effect for yourself feel free to show it to me and I will absolutely try and shout it out on my Instagram story if you send that to me because that's that's impressive that's a time commitment and uh yeah yeah don't waste your time though what I hope you've enjoyed this video learn something from it and if you're someone who has been requesting this for the past few weeks I hope it was everything that you were hoping that it would be so that being said if you did enjoy this learn something new do feel free to show your support believe me like in the video sharing it with your friends or even subscribing to my channel I upload two new filmmaking tutorials every single week but that's all for now keep creating and I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Aidin Robbins

Views: 237,483

Rating: 4.9667954 out of 5

Keywords: aidin robbins, aiden robbins, aidan robbins, map zoom effect, map zoom after effects, drone, map, after effects, tutorial, breakdown, are travel videos ruining filmmaking, google maps, effect, transition

Id: My885zIngz0

Length: 11min 46sec (706 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2019