- Hey, this is Steve
from Unexplored Films, and today we are recreating our Mission Impossible
mask effect tutorial! Recently a company has got in touch and they would like something similar to promote their products, so we said we can recreate it and we might even be able
to make it a little better. So today we're using two people and a rubber mask, and we are using some
After Effects trickery to try and blend the two together. We've got a Sony FS7 to do the recording with a field monitor, and we have playback here off to one side so that we can see if
the movements line up on top of each other,
so let's see how we do. So the main thing we did differently with this effect to the first time we tried it was: when we
did it the first time, we actually just glued one head onto another body - we glued the head that was going to disappear onto the body that was already there and was gonna stay there until the end. First person's head disappears to reveal the second person's face underneath, and the body never changes, it's always the second person. And the problem with that is, you just can't do much moving around. We wanted to go one better this time and actually have the
first person's real body walk in, and then transforming the body as well as the face, when
the arm moves across. So, that was our challenge this time. So we counted in time
with the first person walking in and doing the move, we counted the seconds between the steps, and then the mask coming off. And then we played that clip back when we filmed the second person so that they could walk in time to the first clip. First person enters frame, acts the first part of the shot, moves their head in a
way the mask will move, but doesn't move their arms. "Nice, and off. That wasn't bad. That was a smug look. All right, let's swap." I played the second person that the first person turns into when he removes the mask. "I guess we'll try a few versions of this! and then see what happens, okay. That's recording." The move the second
person wearing the mask has to do is to bring their hand up to basically the earlobe,
and then pull the mask across the face and off. Second person acts the
second part of the shot and then exits frame. "Is a smile better or worse?
- Smug face. - Smug face, okay.
- Look what I can do" - Once again, it helped that we were a similar height, I think different heights would cause a bit of a problem with this effect. We had similar color eyes, which also helps this effect. And once again, we wore
exactly the same costume, which was a jumper with a high neckline and anything to hide the neck makes the whole thing easier. Now, we play it back and
we see if they line up. The first thing we did was, we did a simple overlay of what we thought were the best takes. So, we just checked the
timings were accurate. "That's actually not too bad. That might just work." So once again, the first thing we did was put the takes that we thought were the best into After Effects and removed the background using Keylight. There are those tutorials about refining the edges and making that
look really really good, but we did a basic key to begin with, just to remove the blue screen and that allows us to use the bodies and the heads independently and not be locked into
any kind of background. When wearing the rubber
mask, it actually made the whole head bigger
on me, on person two. So, person one's body and head had to be scaled up slightly to fit over the mask and that made the transition between the two bodies a little bit harder. We actually ended up
changing from the footage of the first person's face to a still because that actually made it easier. Although we had shot the first person turning his head, we actually found that it was far easier to control a still image than a moving image. So as you can see here, we ended up with loads
of different layers. It starts fairly simply
with the first person walking in, lots of layers
to hide the mask join, and then fewer layers, again, for the second person walking out. We parented everything to a null object so that you wouldn't have thinks wobbling around on top of each other. Then we cut out the arm. Cutting out the arm was very important. Once again, it can just hide all of the mess underneath, where one thing's turning
into another thing. So, the arm should sit right at the top of your stack of clips. And we actually added a slight shadow to the arm as well, just
so it would look like the second's person's arm was really sitting on top of the first person's face. So, in our original tutorial, we used the After Effects Mesh Warp Tool to distort the face. This time around we used the Puppet Tool, which seemed to work a little bit better. Essentially though, you're
doing the same thing: distorting the first person's face to match the movements of the rubber mask underneath. So as the rubber mask is going in different directions, the face is going in
those directions as well. And that way, if we choose to fade to parts of the mask underneath, everything is moving in the same way. Once you've got the first person's face moving in the right way
with the Puppet Tool, you can then duplicate this layer as many times as is necessary to create a lot of little layers and fade different parts of the face at different speeds, so that little parts of the face can have some of the rubber wrinkles and stretch marks appearing through it. Next we worked out, part of the reason this effect can look really really good, is to actually change the eyes. Now, if it was a real
mask, you would be seeing the eyes through the eye holes, so, we actually built another layer, which was simply the first person's eyes subtly changing to the
second person's eyes. As soon as you chop that out and make it only visible
through the eye holes, it's just a little bit of extra help, so that by the time the mask comes off, you're already expecting to see the second person's eyes, and that really helped with the effect. And if we overlay these layers with colors it's much easier to see where one layer ends and the next one is beginning. First person in red, the arm moving across hiding the join, and then there's the second person waiting underneath. The eyes are just sitting on top of the whole thing to look like they're visible through the mask. The finishing touch then was to create a background, which we hadn't really
bothered with last time, we just filmed it in front of a wall, it didn't look great, it was more of a test than anything else. So we wanted something
kind of dark and sinister just to fit with the
spy theme of the piece. I already had a shot of a warehouse, which I was able to use because I've got this on a previous job, onto this, I added a light source just from this top corner here, because that looks kind of similar to where this light is hitting the actors. It sounds obvious, but anything you can do to kind of match the actors so that people aren't immediately thinking it was filmed in front of a green screen is really going to help the effect. And then final stages are, of course, color correcting, sound design, record the mask coming off and add in some other
sound effects if you like, footsteps, Foley, that sort of thing, and you'll have a great effect. So, that was our Mission
Impossible mask effect done for a second time, so give it a go and let
me know how you get on and check out the other
videos on the channel. I've been Steve from Unexplored Films and I'll see you soon.
