Hello, Steve from Unexplored Films here back with another filmmaking
DIY effect tutorial, and today we are trying
a missing face effect. Now is this possibly a
bit more of a gory effect to try this time, but it was one that we were
really keen to have a go at. This is designed to make it look like half the face is missing and showing through to the skull underneath and it's been used in
the TV show Breaking Bad for Gus Fring and in The Dark Knight with Harvey Two-Face, and it's also a little similar
to Imhotep in The Mummy and the cursed pirates in the first Pirates
of the Caribbean film, so this could be a fun one to do if you're trying something
with a fantasy element. Now, once again I've picked quite an ambitious effect to recreate this time. This is not an incredibly
easy thing to do, but I'm always trying to
do a lot with a little just using the tools and
equipment I already have. And if you're enjoying these
DIY Hollywood effect tutorials, please subscribe and you
will get to see some more, and a big thank you for all
the amazing support so far for this channel. So we basically used the
shot from Breaking Bad, - massive spoiler alert - as our template, and part of the reason
this worked so well is they use a camera move to
reveal the missing face, so we set up a slider
pointing at a doorway and the idea would be the
character would appear in the doorway and the camera
would slowly reposition to reveal the face head-on. So we did a few tests for the blocking and worked out where
I would need to stand. Now one of the reasons this
is quite a difficult effect is that the skull requires 3D animation to match the head movement, and this was the first time I
had tried anything like this. But I decided to film
the raw elements first and then worry about that later. And if you want to see why it's good to film something that's
going to be very complicated to composite as steadily as possible and then add the movement later, check out my video on
how to do a clone effect using a regular slider
with no motion control. So we tried this effect without knowing if this method would work, but we made a start by
covering half my face in green face paint for the area that would be missing and disguising the join with some makeup to look like burn marks. We also prepared a prop shirt where half of it was ripped and damaged and finally we added some dots to the green part of my
face using red gaffer tape, and my plan was to use
these as tracking markers in case I needed to
cleanly track the movement of the face, but all of this was an experiment and we didn't know exactly
how we would edit this until we had filmed it. So next we worked out the
blocking with the slider, and I had a monitor off to one side where we could see what we were getting. Now although the shot
in Breaking Bad reveals the skeleton face as the
camera is still moving, we cheated a little bit and decided to make the camera move stop before I would turn and reveal the face. This was because I didn't
know if this effect was going to work very well, and I wanted to limit all of the problems that we might face. We also deliberately kept the light off in the shed behind the door because again, I thought
this would make it easier to disguise any problems
with the compositing if the area behind was completely black, so we tried the camera move
and the blocking a few times until we thought we
had a pretty good take. The character walks out
of the door looking dazed. The camera stops, and then the character turns to look facing the lens revealing the face before finally dropping out of frame as if he dies or at least
needs some emergency care. Once we had the winning
take I was pretty confident that I could use this in
order to do the compositing. I also knew I wanted
to create an explosion so for reference I flicked
the lights on and off with the camera in its first position, and that was everything we needed to film and then it was time to
head into the edit bay. So as usual, the first step
was to load up the winning take into Premiere Pro which is
where I do all my finishing and sound design, and then replace it with an
After Effects composition to send the same clip into After Effects, and like a lot of these effects, you can do some of this Premiere as well, but I prefer After Effects because I think it gives me more control, so the first thing to
do in After Effects was to duplicate the clip so that we had a second layer and to use the Keylight effect on the top layer to remove
the green areas of the face, and using the Screen Matte option you can easily see the area
that's getting affected and then refine it. With the layer underneath turned off, this showed a transparent area now where the green face used to be, and by drawing a mask around the figure using the Pen tool, we now have this as a separate layer on top of the original clip which could serve as a background. Next I added a black solid and masked that out into a simple shape using the Pen tool, which just allowed me to see the face without the green area. And now you can see why I shot this in front of a dark doorway so that I wouldn't have
to worry about the edges of the black solid. So, now it was time to
tackle the 3D skull. Now as I say, I am not a 3D animator and I had never tried this before, but I had recently learned
about a free program called Blender which is a
powerful 3D animation program, and the best thing is there is a website called Blend Swap where
people share their 3D models, which meant I didn't need
to build this from scratch. So I downloaded Blender
and I downloaded the skull. Now, as I say I hadn't used Blender at all so I was completely new to it and it was a little bit
intimidating at first, but just by watching a couple of tutorials I found that I could
learn the bare minimum to do this effect! This meant that I could
use the original footage as a background and then animate the skull over the top. So to make things easier,
I created a new composition with the original clip in After Effects and used the Stabilize Motion tool using two motion trackers
on the tracking markers on the face. By ticking Position, Rotation, and Scale, this provided a pretty
neat stabilized version of the clip of me performing the move. The tracking markers didn't quite work at the beginning and the
end where the software kind of got confused so I manually
added those key frames to the beginning and the end. Next I added a rule of thirds grid just to see if the head was
going to stay in the middle, which it pretty much did, and then exported this stabilized version of the footage as a separate
clip, and this is a little bit like the Beats headphones commercials where the headphone always stays in the middle of the screen. Next I could add this clip in Blender as my layer behind the 3D skull. Now rather than trying
to do a crash course in Blender, I will
simply provide the links for the tutorials that I watched in order to learn how to animate this. So now I was able to line up the skull on top of the stabilized part of the original footage and I'm sure there might be easier ways to do it than this if I knew
a lot about 3D animation, but I manually tried to keyframe the skull to match the movements of the head using Position, Rotation and Scale. I had no idea if this would work, but I gave it my best shot. The export of the stabilized
head was very handy here because it kind of limited the movements that the skull had to do. Because the head is pretty stationary for the whole middle part, the main thing was to get
a turn of the head right at the beginning and then
another turn of the head the other direction and a
kind of tilt up at the end. Now this required a
lot of trial and error, so I did not get this
right the first time. Next I exported the animated skull from Blender, which created a series of PNG images on a transparent background, and for those of you who
don't want to learn Blender and who just want to use 2D elements, the 3D images on site such
as Sketchfab allow you to rotate the image and
see all the way around it. There's nothing to stop you
doing a screen recording of a 3D skull that you can find online. If you filmed a very
simple, much more basic move than what I did, you could probably use that screen recording as
your skull to composite in. Next I realized I would
have to attach this to the face and get it to
move in exactly the same way, so once again I used the
same tracking markers on the face and this time
clicked Track Motion. This provided the exact
same move that I had done on the stabilized clip
I used for reference. Next I created a new Null Object, which is just an invisible thing which you can attach other things to so that they don't move around. Then I applied the motion
from the motion track to the Null Object. This meant that the Null Object, this red square, would then
move in exactly the same way as the tracking markers on the face, and again, it couldn't really get it right at the start and the end so
I manually keyframed that, so then I could bring in
the Blender export files, which were just an image sequence, and I made sure to conform that to the same frame rate as the project. I could then drop this in on top and parent that layer to the Null Object. Once I lined up the
skull on top of the face, the middle part of the
clip stayed pretty much where it was meant to, so to get a better idea of
whether this would work, I took the skull layer and simply dropped it underneath the layer with the missing face. Now I could really see if
the skull was lining up or not, and of course it definitely wasn't on the head turn at the beginning, so again, I could use the tracking markers for reference to try and
manually line up the skull over the face as the head turn happened, and this took a lot of trial and error and I did this a fair few times before I got one that I thought worked. This is because our brains are really good at spotting when something
doesn't look right and trying to line up a 3D object on top of another 3D object
was really, really hard, and if you want to see more about trying to perfectly line up one
layer on top of another, check out my Mission Impossible
Mask Effect tutorial. Eventually though, I got the skull moving in a fairly decent way and
the next thing to do was to remove the tracking
markers and the eye, which of course I hadn't covered
up, using a separate mask, which I then key framed
to match the movement. When I did the animation in Blender, I was never going to get
the moves 100% right, and I actually went back
and changed the animation a few times during this process and just kept reexporting the skull until it was looking better. I also worked out how
to change the lighting that had been provided with
the 3D model in Blender so that I could better match the light that we used when we
filmed the original take, and although I was never
happy 100% with the move, I got it to a point where I
thought it matched the face as well as I could. I added another black solid and created a mask just
down the edge of the face. This was to try and disguise the join between the skull and the head a bit more and make it look a bit
more like the burn marks that we had added with the makeup. I parented the shadow layer
to the same Null Object so that it would move
with everything else. Next I wanted to add
some bloodier texture, so I took a look at Unsplash, which is a great site that
provides free stock images for you to use. I searched for 'meat' and
found a close up of some meat and actually used this
as the area down the face to give me some slightly
bloodied-looking skin texture. I did this because I remembered they had done something similar in Pirates of the Caribbean
by scanning strips of turkey jerky into the computer to create some of the
pirates' ragged faces! And once again I paired this meat layer to the null object so that it would move
with everything else. So now I had the face looking pretty good and it was time for
some finishing touches. For the explosion I used Video Copilot's excellent Action Essentials, which I've had for a long time. I masked out the shed
wall on the right side of the screen, which
meant that I could drop in the explosions behind it. I also added some dust
elements from Action Essentials to cover the whole image. Next I added some falling
debris from the ceiling inside the shed. Next I went back and found the clip of me switching the light on in the shed. I took this and lined
up the light coming on at the very moment when
the explosion happens and I increased the temperature on that to make it look even hotter. Finally I duplicated this clip and masked out the windows in the glass door on the top layer. This meant I could
duplicate the fire, slot it in between the two layers and kind of make it look
like a little reflection when the explosion happens. This is all just building credibility that this is all stuff
that's actually happening and hasn't been added afterwards. Finally I precomposed everything
into a single composition which is usually a good way to finish because then you can add any final effects to the whole sequence in one go. I added an adjustment layer to the whole thing and then did a little
bit of color correction just to make it look a
little bit more dramatic, and finally I added some
artificial camera movement and our friends over at
cinecom.net have provided a great free set of
fake handheld movements to be applied to your footage. So finally I went back into Premiere where I could see the finished
After Effects composition and did my sound design. So I started with the location
sound of the footsteps and added the explosion and lots of noises to
match the debris falling and I used the same trick as in the superhero landing effect video by adding a burglar
alarm in the background to make it sound like this
was a really loud thing which had caused a lot of damage nearby. I also added some ear ringing and couple of other things just to make it sound like this was from the character's point of view and yeah... it is not his day! So there you have it. That's how we took our basic slider shot of the shed doorway with
the figure appearing and added everything else to make it look like the face was missing and something had gone very badly wrong, and if you enjoyed this one, why not drop a comment
for what Hollywood effect you would like to see recreated next. So guys I really hope you enjoyed that. Please hit that subscribe button and you will see some more of these. I have been Steve from Unexplored Films and I will see you next time.
