I want you to meet my buddy, Ian McFarland. He's half of a directing cinematography duo
called McFarland & Pecci. Ian is not only a great dude and an absurdly
talented director, shooter, and editor, but he's also, like myself, a metalhead. Ian has directed music videos for some of
the biggest metal bands out there, like Killswitch Engage, Meshuggah. Love Meshuggah. Fear Factor. And, a little band called Agnostic Front. Now maybe you're not familiar with them, but
they are legends in the hardcore and punk scenes. Ian has been doing a lot of documentary work
lately, and so he was approached by the band to direct a documentary about Agnostic Front. So, to raise money for the film he shot a
Kickstarter campaign promo and asked his buddy, Joey, for a little help with some graphics
and compositing. Here's the email that I got from Ian, and
I want to highlight a couple of points. First, I would basically only have a few hours
to work on this. Two, there would not be time for any revisions,
so I have to get it right the first time. Three, Ian trusts me. Great. Now, I've worked with Ian before. Here's a clip from a video we did a few years
ago with a ton of visual effects work in it. So, having done jobs together, I knew what
sort of style he liked and I knew that I could make something cool looking. But, with only a free hours of free time to
actually dedicate to this, I had to be surgical. So, I used a trick, it's one of my go to moves,
when timelines get compressed like this. Don't just show one option. So, let's first take a look at the rough cut
of the promo that Ian sent over. - My name is Ian McFarland, and I'm directing
The Godfathers of Hardcore. - [Joey] You can see where Ian tried to mock
up what he was going for. He also sent over this poster that was gonna
accompany the film, and that's it. That's all I had to work with. So, let's jump into After Effects, and let's
work our way through this together. So, the first shot we're gonna work on is
this one where we're gonna put the logo on this wall. If you look back at the reference, you can
see kind of the mock up that Ian did for me just to kind of let me know what he was thinking. So, the first thing we're gonna need to do
is get a track so we can actually track the logo onto the wall, and you'll see here that
the footage is moving. This is like a slightly handheld camera move,
but it's not moving very much, and there's nothing over here to track. This is just a completely white wall. So unfortunately, we can't just do like a
nice easy mocha planar track. So, what I'm gonna do is just do my best. So, let's double click on the shot so we can
go into a footage viewer. I have my Tracker open, and I'm just gonna
say Track Motion. And I'm gonna zoom way in here, and what I'm
gonna try and do is track two points that are on this surface somewhere, and I'm gonna
try and just get a position and rotation 2D track. So, I'm looking over here at this spot right
here, and there's a lot of contrast there, so I think that will be a decent track point. And you know, I expanded this inner box out
a little bit, because the feature that we're tracking is very small. Expanding this inner box a little bit is going
to force the tracker to look for more pixels on each frame which tends to give you a little
bit more of a locked on result. This outer box, this is the search area, and
since the shot is barely moving, I can make that pretty small, okay? So now I'm gonna select rotation and I need
a second track point. Now, I wanna basically use this line here
as a reference, this edge. And actually, now that I'm thinking about
it, it might make more sense to try and track this point, because what that's gonna let
me do is if I can find another tracking point somewhere along this line I can actually use
this as a visual guide to see how my track is doing. So, one of the things that you can do with
the Tracker is you can track things that are not actually features but are just kind of
intersections between two features. So for example, this black pole and the white
wall form a pretty good trackable feature, right, right about there let's say, and you
can see that the line that's drawn between those two trackers, it lines up perfectly
along that edge. So, this is gonna give me a good visual representation
of the success of my track, right? So let's make this a little bit bigger, and
make the search area smaller, and I'm gonna make sure I'm on the first frame, and I'm
just gonna hit Track, and we're gonna see how this does, and hopefully it tracks okay. Alright, so if we zoom out and I just hit
the Space Bar and we play this. Right, it's a little difficult to tell, but
it looks like we've got a track. And one thing I should point out is that I
made sure to pick two points that are far apart, and the reason I did that is because
this looks like it was shot with kind of a wider lens, a wide angle lens, and so that
means that you're gonna get some lens distortion towards the edge of the frame, and in the
center of the frame you're gonna have a lot less distortion. So, that's gonna make this point move a lot
more than this one relative to the actual shape of the wall. So, if you're in a situation like this where
you're kind of doing a hacky two point track because you can't actually track a surface,
try to track points that are as far apart as possible. They'll get you a more accurate result. Alright, so now that I've got that track I'm
gonna add a null object to my scene and I'm just gonna call this my Track Null. And I like to apply tracking data to a null
instead of actually applying it to the logo, because then I can move the logo around, and
if I need to I can even keyframe it and adjust it, but I'm not screwing up the original tracking
data. So, I've made a new tracking null. I'm gonna go into my Tracker Settings and
say Edit Target and make sure that I'm applying the motion to that tracking null, that track
null. And then I'm gonna hit Apply and make sure
X and Y dimension are selected, and there we go, alright? So now, this tracker in theory it should line
up, and you've got to see that it's been rotated and it lines up pretty much right on with
the ledge. Now, let's see how well that actually tracks. So, what I'm gonna do is grab the logo, and
I need to import that logo. And I've got a little folder here from Ian,
and here is the McFarland & Pecci Films logo. So, first thing I'm gonna do is bring that
into its own comp, because as you can see, it's a black and white image. So, what I'm gonna do is make a black solid,
or a dark gray, that's fine, too, and I'm gonna tell it to use this image as a luma
matte. Let me turn on transparency and show you exactly
what that did. So now it's just taking the white parts of
that logo and using them as an alpha channel. And we're getting a little bit of transparency
here because this logo probably wasn't truly black and white. It was probably like a CMYK file as opposed
to RGB, so the black level is gonna be a little brighter. So, what I need to do is add a Levels effect
to that image and just push the white values a little bit more, push the black values a
little bit more, and now we've got this nice, knocked out logo. So, I can take this, put it in the shot, and
I can parent it to my track. And I can get rid of this reference shot. I don't actually need that anymore. Alright, so here is our logo, and I need to
map it to the wall, but I can just kind of roughly scrub and see that yeah, it looks
like it's tracked in there. It's kind of hard to tell until we get the
perspective all worked out and all that. So, to actually get this thing to feel like
it's on the wall, I could make it a 3D layer and mess with the rotation, but I'm just gonna
do it the easy way and I'm gonna grab Distort, CC Power Pin. And I'm using the Power Pin as opposed to
the Corner Pin because the Power Pin let's you actually grab edges like this and scale
them up and down. It's a little bit easier way to work. So, I can take the bottom edge and I can actually
line them up with this edge here. And then I can just sort of eyeball the rest
of it and make sure that it looks okay, and then I can grab these edges and slide them
around, right, and it stays in perspective. So, I can kind of get a good perspective here. And I can make it bigger, and maybe it needs
to come over a little bit, and I wanna make sure that it's readable. That's the key. Now, the reference, it was further over here,
but I think that this makes it a little more readable. And I'm probably, I think I want it to be
even bigger. Alright, I really want this thing to read,
alright? McFarland & Pecci Films, that looks pretty
good. Cool, and then I'm just gonna do a RAM preview
and see how this feels, alright, and see if we're... I mean, it's actually amazing. There's a little bit of slippage happening,
but that is pretty good, and it's a short shot, and I think that's gonna work well. So, you could say, "Okay, that's good. "We're done with that shot," but I like to
add little details, and I like to make things feel a little bit more interesting. So, I'm gonna go into this precomp, and I
have a bunch of stock kind of stuff that I've collected over the years, some grunge maps
from CGTextures.com, and I grabbed one of those, so here's a grunge map, okay? Let me scale it down and try to get it something
like that so it's covering up the logo. And I could even scale it down a little bit
like this to get a little bit more of that detail in there, and I am going to put a Levels
effect on there, and I'm gonna crush the levels like this. I'm gonna crush the blacks, push the whites
up, so I'm getting maximum contrast, and then I'm gonna set the transfer mode to Silhouette
Luma. Now what this is gonna do is it's gonna use
the luminance of this layer as a luma matte for the entire comp, everything underneath
it. It's kind of a nifty way of doing this without
having to precomp both of these together and then set the track matte setting to luma matte. So now with this set up like this, I can actually
push the blacks a little more, mess with the gamma, and then I can actually go in and set
the black level, sorry, the white level, down a little bit, and I'm basically just breaking
up this texture, sorry, breaking up the logo with a texture so it feels a little bit less
perfect, like maybe it was a decal or is was painted on the wall and it's just been scraped
away a little bit, and it looks a little bit more realistic. So, already I like the way that's looking
a little bit better. It just feels a little neater to me, okay? Now, another thing that I want to do, you'll
notice there's this big glare here, this big hotspot from the light, and if this was painted
on there, if this was a sticker or something, that would show up over the logo, and it's
not. So, we need to add that back on top. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna duplicate
my final, you know, this is my footage layer. I'm gonna rename this GLARE. I'm gonna put this on the very top, and I'm
gonna duplicate my logo, put it on top, and I'm gonna rename this MATTE, and then I'm
gonna set my GLARE layer to use MATTE as its alpha matte. Let me just solo that so you can see what
it's doing, okay? So, all I'm doing is I'm basically knocking
out this footage layer so that it only shows up over the footage. And the reason I'm gonna do that is because
now I can color correct it, okay? So, I'm gonna crush the blacks and push the
whites up a little bit. I'm getting a lot of color out of this, so
I'm gonna desaturate this too, because I don't want all that color. So let me just bring the saturation way down
like that, and then I'm gonna unsolo this, and you'll see what it's doing. And I could actually, let me change this mode
to Screen. I might even push this black a little further. And you'll see what it's doing. I'm basically taking the glare that was on
the wall, and I'm color correcting it so only the brightest parts are visible, and then
I can just adjust the opacity, and I'm just bringing back a little bit of that glare on
the wall. And so now it really looks like that was painted
or like a decal or something on that wall, okay? And it really sticks on there kind of nice. Now, it's not perfect, but it's a short shot. There's really not a good easy way given we
have some pretty serious time constraints on this project, there's not a great way to
get a good track without a ton of work, so this is gonna be pretty much good enough. Now, let me show you... So this is definitely like good. This is one version, and actually I think
I might, I wanna make sure that this is really legible, so I'm gonna bring that glare down
a little bit. There we go. So this is good, and so I'm gonna go ahead
and go into my comps here. And let's see, of course I didn't name this
correctly, so let me bring this down here. So, I'm gonna call this Logo_r1. Now, this is great, but I'd like to try something
a little extra, too. One of my favorite things to do when I'm working
for a client or anybody is give them options. It's just a smart thing to do. It generally insures that your client is going
to pick something rather than just try to figure out what they don't like about what
you just showed them. So, I'm gonna duplicate this and we're gonna
do another version, and what I thought would be cool, you know, because there's movement
down here, you see a person walking on the frame, you may not notice this, because now
it's composited on there, not perfectly, but it's fairly convincing, you may not even notice
it. So, I want to make sure you do notice it,
because this is the production company, this is the director of this film. So, what I want to do is make another version
where this animates on. So, here's how we're gonna do that. So, I've got this logo comp here, and that
comp lives here. So, what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna organize
this a little bit better. I usually make a PC folder, stands for precomp,
and I keep that in my Comps folder. So, I'm gonna duplicate this, and I'm gonna
call this Animate. And then in this animated comp what I want
to do is animate this on. This whole film, it's about these guys that
started this hardcore band. They are covered in tattoos. And so I like to look around and see what
else is already present in the material if I'm trying to come up with some sort of look
for titles or something like that. So ink, as cliche as that may be with motion
graphics, ink sort of makes sense. So, I wanted to try and bring this on in some
cool kind of organic inky way. I can't believe I just said organic. So, what I'm gonna do is I have a bunch of
stock of ink, right? And you can find this stuff just about anywhere. Just google, "Ink footage," and you can get
it on Pond5. I actually don't even remember where I got
this, but so for example, here's one of the shots. It's just a blob of ink that someone dropped
onto some paper or onto some glass, and it's been color corrected a little bit, and it
creates this very beautiful effect. And what you can do with that is you can take
it, let's put it on top here, and what I need is for the ink to be white and the rest of
it to be black so I can use it as a matte. So, I'm gonna go to Channel, and Invert my
footage, and then I'm going to go to Levels and I'm just gonna push the levels so that
this actually turns fully white. And I can leave the black where it is. I may have to push it a little bit, but I
think that's all I need. And if I then set the mode of this to Stencil
Luma, then now what I can do is I can use this to reveal the logo. Now, here's the problem. Let me set this back to normal. The problem we have is that this blob is not
big enough. It doesn't cover the logo. So, I could scale it up, but when you scale
it up you're gonna kind of blow out some of the detail, right, and you're gonna lose some
of these nice edges and stuff, and I don't want to do that. So, here's what I'm gonna do. I am going to set this to Screen mode, and
the reason I'm doing this, let's see here. So let me try it. Let me actually set this to Normal. Oh, not Dissolve, Normal, right, and I'm gonna
just turn it down like this, and turn the opacity way down. And what I wanna do is combine multiple ink
drops to eventually cover up this whole thing. So, here's one, okay? And then what I could do is I could just duplicate
that. Let me see what happens if I set this to Screen. I should be able to, there we go, alright. And then maybe this one I could flop it, right,
like this, and I could rotate it like this, and stick it over here, and offset it like
three frames, okay? And then I could duplicate it, but I could
replace it with a different ink drop footage and maybe stick that ink drop there, right,
and offset it slightly differently. And let's take a look at what that looks like. Cool, that's looking pretty good. Alright, and I can see there's a little gap
down there that needs to be filled in. So, I'm gonna then offset and grab another
clip, and put this one down here, alright? And I basically just need to make sure that
by the end I've got the entire title covered up with these ink blotches. Okay, that's pretty good. So then I can precomp this whole thing, and
we'll just call this InkPC. Let's hop in here and set all of these to
Screen and 100% transparency. And because they're set to Screen they're
just going to basically overlap each other and create this nice little ink transition,
and then I can set this to be a Stencil Luma, okay? And so this is what it's gonna do. It's gonna actually reveal this in this cool,
inky, I mean it looks really neat already. It's just kind of, this is a very old trick,
but it works. It really looks cool. And another thing that you can do with this
is duplicate this. And actually, the way I've got this set up
I can't do it in here. What I need to do is come in here, precomp
this one more time and say InkPC2, and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set the opacity
to 50%, I'm gonna duplicate it and set this opacity to 100%, and I'm gonna take the 100%
version and offset it by like a frame. And then I need to set this to Screen mode. And what that's gonna do, alright, you can
see it's gonna basically always have one extra frame of that ink at 50% opacity being composited,
okay, and it's gonna give you a little bit more, it's almost like a feathering effect,
right? Because some of the transitions when these
inks come on it's pretty quick, it's pretty harsh, and this kind of softens it a little
bit, okay? So now in Logo_r2 what I'm gonna do is just
go ahead and replace these two clips with this animated version. So now, at the beginning of the shot this
thing is gonna animate on, right, like it was ink revealing it onto the wall. And it looks neat, which is cool, it's kind
of nifty. On top of that, more importantly, it draws
your eye to the logo, okay? So, it's just sort of an extra layer of, "Oh,
okay. "So this is like this film "has a little bit
of production value behind it." Cool. And what's great is, the client didn't ask
for this. So he may not like it. He may think it's too much. Well cool, I'm gonna give him this one, too. And one thing that might be another cool option
is to have this a little bit smaller. This is kind of matching the size of the reference,
you know, the size of the logo on the frame for the reference, but one thing I like to
do a lot is go full frame, take a look in my comp at a full 1920 by 1080. It gives you a much better idea of how something
feels size wise, and this feels really big, which might be okay, but it'd be an easy enough
option to just say, "Okay, let's do Logo_r1Small," right? So we could also have a small version of this
logo. And really, all I need to do, let me parent
the MATTE to this, and let me scale this down a little bit, and let me actually go full
frame and kind of take a look and figure out where does this want to be? And what's cool is because everything is parented
the way it's working, that glare and everything, it's cool it stays put and it moves through
the logo as I move it. But you know, like maybe a little closer to
the center of the frame would help so that our eye is kind of already here and it doesn't
have to travel too far to see Ian walking in the frame. So I don't know, somewhere about there feels
pretty good. Cool. And so then what I could do is I could just
copy the position and scale of this, and then I'll do Logo_r2Small, right? And I'm gonna parent the MATTE to this and
then I'm just gonna paste that on there, and now I've got the same thing in the animated
version. So, you could see how quickly and easily you
can build up. Now I'm giving him four options for this one
shot, and it literally didn't take more than an extra five minutes, maybe 10 because I'm
talking my way through it, but it's gonna add a lot of value to this transaction between
Ian and I. He's gonna look at this and say, "This is
fantastic! "I have options, and I can try things and
see what works." Personally, I kind of like the small version. I'll probably recommend that to him, but it's
totally up to him. He's the director. Alright, so let's move onto the next shot. So, here's the reference of the second shot
where Ian walks in, turns the light on, and you've got some credits kind of on the right
side. And again, this was just reference kind of
mocked up by the editor, Tony. I like the idea of having credits embedded
in the environment like this. I think it's great. One problem, and you can probably already
see, is that you kind of have to work around what's in the shot. You got these posters on the wall, and really
this would be great if the type was right in here but you've got this poster on the
wall. Luckily, this is a pretty simple planar track
situation, and I think we can probably, without too much trouble, remove that third poster
and put type there. I think it'll make the shot feel a lot more
balanced and a lot more planned out, which will be very nice. Here's the actual shot, and one thing that
I realized to my dismay is that in the actual cut, which is changed a little bit, Ian does
walk in front of that poster, so there will be like a tiny bit of Roto. It's only like three or four frames of Roto,
so not the end of the world. But, we do need to remove this poster, so
how the heck are we gonna do that? Let me show you. So, we need to, first, get a good planar track
on this shot, and we really only need it once the shot starts moving, which is there. So, what I'm gonna do is duplicate this layer,
and I'm gonna trim it. That was the Option + Left Bracket Key. It trims the layer to wherever the play head
is. And then I need to track this shot in mocha. So, I'm gonna go up to Animation, and say
Track in mocha AE, okay? And that's gonna open up mocha for me. It's opening, it's bouncing around, there
we go. And so then I wanna make sure that I have
Cache Clip turned on, and I usually leave everything default, so that's good. Yes, we can overwrite. Cool, alright, and you can see there's an
in and out there. So, that's the only part of the clip that's
gonna get cached, okay? So we're not caching the beginning. We're only doing the part right before where
the camera starts to move, okay? And I'm gonna have this loop like this. So, what I'm gonna do is just grab basically
an area like this. I mean this is kind of perfect. You've got two perfectly rectangular things
on the wall. This is gonna be a very easy track for mocha. I'm gonna hit Track and mocha is gonna step
through and track. And as Ian starts to cross over this poster,
right about here, I'm just gonna grab these points and move them over. I'm gonna keep tracking. I'm gonna stop, move them over a little more,
right? And I'm basically just gonna keep doing this
to ensure that we get a good, accurate track, but that we're not tracking Ian, okay? And this really doesn't take that much time. I wish there was a little bit more that we
could track here. And that's really, these are like the last
couple of frames. Alright, and we're pretty much done, okay? So, we've tracked that area and now what we
need to do is set up an image plane. So I'm gonna come up here and I'm gonna click
this. And in mocha this is called a surface, and
a surface is basically a corner pin. And to just test out how well this works,
I'm gonna line the corners up with these corners of the posters just like this, alright? Then, I'm gonna tell mocha to insert a grid,
an eight by eight grid, and now when I hit Play you can see that that sticks perfectly
to that wall, which is fantastic, okay? So, the next step is I am going to be using
this track kind of in two ways, actually. There's gonna be sort of two separate tracks
here, alright? So, what I'm gonna do, let me rename this. So, I'm gonna be using this tracking information
to track the type on the wall, alright? So that's gonna be the first track. So, let me go back to the first frame here,
and I need to position this corner pin a little bit more I guess in an area where the type
is gonna be. So, let me just take this whole surface, I'm
just gonna move it over like this. So remember, we're gonna remove the poster
and we're gonna have something like this, right? And what I can do is insert a different type
of clip, like a logo clip. So now I'll be able to tell like okay, am
I stretching anything out that shouldn't be stretched out? And actually, now that I'm thinking about
this, this is the beauty of the stream of consciousness type of teaching that we're
doing here. Now that I'm thinking about this, there's
a better way to approach this, a much better way. Okay, so here's what we're gonna do. Ignore this. I'm gonna turn this off. Let me try and explain what's going through
my head right now. If I had a corner pin, like this, right, and
I want a corner pin some type to this, it's gonna stretch out and distort my type, and
I'm gonna have to jump through hoops to make sure that the type is not distorted and all
that kind of stuff, and it's gonna be kind of a pain. It's not really gonna, it's possible, but
it's gonna be hard, versus I could do something like this. I am gonna go and click this button here,
and what this is gonna do it's going to make the surface the entire size of the frame. It may not make sense why I'm doing this yet,
okay, but when I hit Play now you'll see that now the entire frame distorts and sticks to
the wall. Now, why is that important? Well now, all I need to do is paint a clean
frame in Photoshop and it will track perfectly to the wall, and then I can also place my
type, let me turn off this logo for a minute, I can also place my type in a 1920 by 1080
frame and it will automatically look correct, it'll distort correctly, and I won't have
to worry about squishing it, or stretching it, or doing anything unintentionally to it. So this technique, this little button here,
this makes it possible to corner pin an entire frame not just a piece of that frame. That makes it a lot easier in a lot of cases
to place things or clean things up. It's very important that I note what frame
this is. This is Frame 348, okay? I need to remember that. So, I'm gonna leave this open for a minute
and I'm gonna go back into After Effects, and I need to go to Frame 348. And it's not 348 in my comp. It's 348 in this footage, okay? So, let me actually scrub through here, and
I want to view this in frames but I'm seeing it in seconds. So, I'm just gonna go up to, I'm gonna go
File, Project Settings, and I'm gonna change this to Frames, okay? So now I can see my frames. And I'm looking for 376. Is that right, 376? No sorry, 348. I'm glad I double checked, 348, okay? So this is the frame matches this frame, and
what I need to do is export this frame out. So, I am going to hit Command + Option + S,
and what that does is it takes this frame and it puts it in the render queue as a still. And I can save it as a Photoshop file, that's
fine. Let me put that in my, let's see here, let
me put it in my Job folder, and I'm gonna make a new folder called OUTPUTS, AE, and
I'm gonna put today's date, which is April 20th, alright? And then I'm just gonna render that frame
out. Alright. I'm gonna hop into Photoshop and open that
frame, and what I need to do is paint out this poster, okay? And it should be pretty easy actually. I'm first gonna try, the first thing I usually
try, let me first make a copy of this just so I have a copy of the original to go back
to. I'll turn that off, and this is gonna be the
clean plate. And for something like this I might be able
to get away with just a selection, and Edit, Fill, Content Aware fill. Yeah, that was amazing. I can't, I love Photoshop! Alright, so that's done. We now have a clean frame. We've gotten rid of that poster. We're good to go. I'm gonna hit Save, close this, hop back to
After Effects. So now what I need to do is import that file,
alright? So, let me grab that, and I'm just gonna bring
it in as footage, because I don't need all the layers. Now, what I need to do is put this in this
comp like this. And what I need to do is go into mocha and
go to Adjust Track and say Export Tracking Data, okay? And I want an After Effects Corner Pin, so
I'm gonna copy to the clipboard, go back to After Effects, and then on this frame I'm
gonna hit Paste. I made sure that I was on the starting frame
here, and you can see I've got corner pin keyframes on every single frame. Let me just turn off, let me solo this. So, when I play this through now you can see
it takes that clean frame out of Photoshop and it's corner pinning it for me. So then what I could do is draw a mask on
it. So, I'm gonna draw a mask where that poster
used to be. And let me unsolo it, and I can literally
just, just crop out just the part I need, because I only need to get rid of that poster. It's literally the only thing in the frame
that has to go. Because this wall is white and Photoshop did
such a bang up job of fixing it, I may need to feather it a little bit just to, like as
the camera turns you're gonna get a little bit of, just a tiny bit of lighting change
and it might give it away, so I'm gonna put like a 20 pixel feather on there, and then
I'm gonna hit M twice and expand my mask out just a little bit. Turn this off. Alright, and pretty much we have created a
clean plate, just like that. Obviously, Ian goes in front of it. We'll have to do a few frames of Roto to get
him to go back in front of that, but now we have a clean plate there. Let's deal with this right at the beginning
here it's totally black, and really we only need it to start showing up, go back here
frame by frame. So that's really the first frame you can even
see it. So, what we're gonna need to do is basically
key frame some sort of brightness effect so that it starts out dark and matches the wall. So, let's put a Levels effect on here and
just start there. So, let me go to the first frame, and I'll
put a keyframe on the histogram. I'm gonna zoom in, and I'm actually going
to crank up my exposure control here a little bit. Now, this doesn't actually effect the output. When you render this doesn't do anything. It's just while you're working you can see
a brighter version or a darker version of your shot, which can be helpful if you're
trying to match values. So, what I might start with is the white output
just bringing it way down. And one thing that you're gonna notice is
that the way things look when they get darker and brighter in the real world is not necessarily
the way After Effects treats things. So, as this wall gets darker, what's actually
happening is the light is turning on, and when it's starting to turn on it's very orange,
and then it gets a little bit brighter and it becomes more white-like the hotter it gets. Well, so we sort of have to mimic that, unfortunately,
in After Effects. So what I would is maybe use some combination
of like the Color Balance effect. Another thing we could do is maybe go into
the red channel and then just do this one channel at a time. This is another way. So, we could take a look at this and say,
"Okay, well let's get the red channel to sit in there." And then we'll get the green channel, and
I'm just hitting Option + 1 for red, Option + 2 for green, Option + 3 for blue, and what
at a time coming in here and just doing my best to match that color. And then we can go to blue, right, and blue
needs to be a little darker too, just like that. And once you get all three channels dialed
in, you should be pretty close, okay? And then we can go to the next frame, and
then we do it again. So, I'm just gonna finish off this process. I'm gonna pause it, and I'm gonna come back. So, what I've done is I've just gone frame
by frame and adjusted the levels on every frame and you can see if you look really closely
you can see a little discoloration happening, but when we RAM preview this and just play
it, and the audience is not expecting some sort of effect to be happening here, I don't
think you'll notice it especially once we have some type there. So, the next thing we need to do is lay out
our type. So, what I'm gonna do is just pull up my reference
here, I'm gonna turn on my reference, and let me turn off this layer here, and I just
want to make sure that I get everything I'm supposed to get. So, I'm just gonna do this really quickly. And the font that we're using is called Keep
Calm, and it's Keep Calm Regular. So, I'm gonna do Shot by, and let me put this
up here so I can actually see it. And all I'm really doing right now is just
getting the information set up. I'm not worried about layout or anything like
that. So we've got Mike Pecci, and all this stuff
needs to be left justified. So, let me go to my Paragraph tab and set
that up, alright. And Mike Pecci is more important than Shot
by, so let's do that, Mike Pecci. And then we're gonna have, let me turn my
layer handles back on here. There we go. Mike Pecci, and then we've got Anthony Jarvis. And a lot of times I like to actually lay
type out in Illustrator or Photoshop, but again, this is one of those gigs where it
just needs to get done really, really quickly, and unfortunately we just don't have the luxury
of time to spend a lot of time noodling around with kerning and all that kind of stuff. So, we're just gonna do it all in After Effects
and just try and get a good result really quickly. Alright, so then we've got Tony Fernandez,
cool. And now I'm gonna turn on my clean plate again,
let me turn off the reference, and let me lay these out, okay? And let's find a good spot for them, so something
like that. Looks pretty good. They're kind of aligned with the posters. I'm gonna go full frame real quick, because
again, when you're working in a smaller window sometimes you might make the type too big
because you're thinking, "Oh, this is a small little frame here. "I need to make sure I can read everything." Yeah, actually, the frame is bigger than you
think. So, take a look at it full screen. It helps me a lot to keep my type from being
too big. And the edited and the shot by, those were
italicized. And I don't want to have an italic weight
of that, so I'm actually just gonna use the little faux-talic, which you probably shouldn't
do, but what are you gonna do? We're quick and dirty here. I do want to take all of these and I'm gonna
precomp them and then I'm gonna colorize them. So, I'm gonna call this Type_Precomp. And I'm just gonna come in here, gonna make
the background a different color, and I just want to make sure that I've spelled everything
right, that there's no really glaring kerning issues that are gonna bother me. This font actually seems to have kerned itself
pretty good. I might be able to tighten up a couple letters
here and there. But other than that, and I hit Escape instead
of Enter, so there we go. Maybe the D and the E, maybe the Y and B could
be a little tighter. Other than that, this feels pretty good. So, I'm gonna come back here and now I'm going
to put a Fill effect on this, and I'm going to colorize it based on a color from the shot,
which is kind of a little thing I like to do. And then what I need to do is I need to copy
this corner pin onto this layer, and I need to make sure I copy it on the first frame
of the corner pin that has keyframes. And what this is gonna do is, and let me actually
just get rid of all these extra layers here. I don't need these anymore. And I've got this extra copy of this I don't
need. So what this is gonna do is it's going to
let that type stick to the wall perfectly just like that. Okay, cool. Alright, so the last thing we need to do to
have a version of this shot that's gonna work perfectly, is to do some quick Roto on Ian. And this is really, it's not gonna be as bad
as it could be because it's literally one. So this frame, it's just like there's a little
bit of maybe his key fob or something there, and then one, two, three, four, five, six. Six frames, that's it. So, not a lot, and he's not moving that much. I might actually just be able to do this with
paint, which is kind of a neat way to do it. So, let's set that up. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have a copy
of this shot, which is gonna be my paint Roto, alright? And I only want that shot to exist as long
as I need it, which is only these few frames. And let me close down some of these windows,
because we're gonna need a little bit more screen real estate here. And I'm gonna move this Roto layer up to the
top, because it's gonna be covering up everything. So, if we look at this what I basically want
to do is create an alpha channel for this Roto layer that's only gonna bring back the
pieces of Ian that I need. And if I look right now, you can see that
I'm looking at the alpha channel. I hit Option + 4 to show me the alpha channel. So, the alpha channel is totally white. That means I'm seeing the entire frame. So, the first thing I need to do is set this
alpha channel to black. So, I'm gonna do that with a Set Matte effect,
sorry, Set Channels effect, and then I'm gonna set the alpha channel to off. So, that basically makes this layer invisible. So, if I solo this you can see there's nothing. You just see through it. What's cool is if I double click this now
and I open up a layer browser, okay? So this is a layer window, and then this is
a comp window, and I have them open at the same time, what I can do is grab my paintbrush. And let me come over here and set my paint
to Alpha, Single Frame, so I'm only painting on the alpha channel, and everything else
looks good. So, what's gonna happen is if I paint over
here like this over here I'll be able to see the result, and I'm basically bringing back
that part of my Roto layer. So, I'm in this mode here. So, there's different modes. You can look just at your alpha channel, which
does us no good, you can paint in this kind of weird mode where when you paint it creates
this pink line around what you're painting. But, this mode, the little red button, works
a little better, and it lets you basically create a little red overlay. And I can zoom into it, and I want to make
my brush, I want the hardness to be 0%, and I may have to make it a little bit bigger,
you can also do that by holding Command and clicking, and what this is gonna let me do
is paint with softness. And I can paint a little bit, and then I can
look. And I can turn this down quite a bit so I
can really see what I'm painting on. And the footage is kind of dark, but you know. So you can see now I've Rotoed out that frame. I'll go to the next frame. I'll do that same thing. I just need to, again, just paint out his
hand. And you can see because the details are really
small and the shot is moving really quickly, doing this with a mask or something, it might
actually take longer than just doing it this way. And I kind of screwed up here. I painted a little too much. I can just grab my Eraser tool and come in
here and just erase, and fix that. There you go. Now that frame is done. So, there's only six of these frames to do,
so this isn't actually gonna take all that long to do. So, I'm just gonna pause it now and I'm just
gonna finish this up, and we'll come back when the Roto is done. Alright, so the Roto is done and you know,
I just used the paint effect and basically just frame by frame just painted in just the
parts of Ian that we needed. Didn't take too long. So let's take a look at this shot. Alright, and light turns on, type is there,
and boom, alright? So pretty cool. We removed a poster. We put the type in. Not that big of a deal. Now, I do want to do the same thing I did
before and actually pop into, make sure I have my Arrow tool here, I want to go into
the type and I want to put that same kind of texture on that I had on the logo shot. So, let me pop into the logo, and I'm just
gonna pop in here and grab my grunge map, and I'm gonna copy here, and make sure that
I extend it so it covers the entire comp, and it's already got a Silhouette Luma on
it, and I just need to position it over the type like this. I think I have Snap on. Let's see here. Which is why... Nevermind, Snap to Guides, there we go. That's why it was getting all that snapping. Oh, I'm still snapping. I don't want it to. I'm not sure why, but what are you gonna do? Alright, so we've got this little texture
on here, so now if I look on this shot you get a little bit of that texture coming back,
which is cool. And there's not really like a glare or anything
I need to add back on top, but I do want to darken this a little bit. I think it'll make it pop a little bit more. I'm also gonna grab my Levels effect and adjust
the alpha of the levels, and I'm just gonna play with it just to see if I want to eat
away a little bit at this more or if I actually wanna go back the other way and make it less
transparent. Somewhere in there looks pretty good. Cool. Alright, so then this is gonna be one version
of this shot. This looks great. Cool, so that's gonna be r1. Then let me throw this in the precomp folder
here. So, I've got Credits_r1, and then for r2,
because of course I like to give options, I want to have that same kind of inky paint
kind of reveal thing happening. So, I'm gonna need another copy of Type_Precomp. So, I'm gonna duplicate this, Type_Precomp_animated,
and I'm going to replace it, pop in here, and then I can just come, I can actually just
come right back to my InkPC here. Let's take a looks at this, something like
this maybe. So, that's InkPC. So, what if I just grab that, throw it over
here, and I set this to Stencil Luma. So now you get that kind of inky reveal, which
is cool. And because the type is a lot smaller than
the logo, what I could do, well actually it's not that much smaller. Let's just make sure it's gonna cover everything
up the way we would need. But, I want to scale it down to maintain a
lot of that detail right on the edges and stuff. Cool, alright, so then turn this back up and
turn this to Stencil Luma, and now we'll get this cool reveal like this. And I want that to basically trigger when
the light turns on, so what I'm gonna do is move the end point of the layer to here and
then slide the whole layer. I want to make sure the keyframes don't move,
okay? Actually, maybe it would be better if it was
sort of already there, like on the wall a little bit, so we have time to really, really
read it fully. Let's see what that looks like. I can play with the timing a little bit, but
I want to make sure that when we see the shot... There we go. I don't know. Maybe we should see it actually reveal on
like that. That might be cool. We could even offset it a little bit more,
maybe like this. I'm gonna set this to half res so we can preview
it a little bit quicker. There we go. Yeah, I think that's nice. It just adds a little bit of you know, just
a little bit of extra production value, a little bit of interest to it. Now, because the type is so small, I do need
to be careful. This kind of looks like it says Snot by Mike
Pecci and not Shot by. So, I'm gonna come in here and I'm just gonna
scale this up a little bit and make sure that it, there we go. Cool. Alright, so now we've got another version
of this shot that has the animation, which is great. Right, make sure that this looks good on the
end, which it does. Alright, so we've got one version without
that animation and another one with, so that's great. So, now let's move onto the next shot. So, in the name of brevity I'm gonna actually
just walk you through the comps that I set up already for the title shot where we actually
have to reveal the title of the film The Godfathers of Hardcore, and I did a few versions of that. So this is the one that I like the best, alright? So let me just do a quick RAM preview and
show you what that looks like. Alright, so we start on the shot of Ian. That's obviously just a place holder still. He's talking to camera. He says, "The Godfathers of Hardcore." You get this awesome inky reveal of the photo
and the type, and this was a really simple setup. So, let's hop into this precomp here. So basically all I have is I have a photo
that was given to me. This is part of the artwork for the poster
for the film, and this is the chest of one of the guys in Agnostic Front. It's a very well known tattooed chest, very
tough, very hardcore looking. So, what I wanted to have happen was I wanted
the type, you know, we've been playing with this kind of inky motif in the previous shots,
so I wanted to do the same thing with the type, and so I needed to build a little bit
of a matte to make that inky thing take up enough room on screen to be able to use it. So, if we come into the precomp for the type,
and then we come into this precomp, which is my ink matte, you can see what I did. I basically just took like an ink blot footage,
right, and I have a whole bunch of this stuff, and I just started layering them on top of
each other in Screen mode, alright? Because they're all white, because I've inverted
them. I mean, the footage actually looks like this. It's white with black ink, but I inverted
it and I screened all of these on top of one another and scaled them and moved them and
rotated them to build up a big area of ink. At the same time, I have an adjustment layer
that's gradually brightening the entire thing to get rid of those little black spots. And then at the end of the transition I have
a white solid that just animates on from 0% to 100% opacity. So all I'm doing is building a little matte
and then I'm using that to reveal the type, cool. So that's it. It reveals the type. There's a little bit of a layer, so this layer
here, this is called my GLOW layer. This is just copy of the type blurred in add
mode. That's literally all it is, and there's a
little bit of a mask so that it glows in the middle but not on the edges. And that's it, and then I just faded up this
information here. Now, I wanted the whole thing to animate on
over Ian's face. So, what I did was I just used that same ink
matte and I just made sure that it was positioned so that you'd be able to read this, and it
just transitions on just like that. It's really, really simple. This is using a luma matte to do that, and
that's the key. When you have a matte that you want to use
that's black and white, you don't use an alpha matte, you use a luma matte, this setting
right here. And look at that, beautiful. Cool. Now, this isn't actually the version that
ended up in the cut, and I thought that that might actually be a problem, because although
this looks really cool, I like the way it looks, it takes a lot longer to come on than
Ian had sort of planned for in the cut. So, this cut happened before any of these
graphics existed, and so I knew that this might be too long. So, I did another version where I made it
a lot simpler, and I basically just created a little bit of a light burn that kind of
cuts to this. And the way I did that was really simple. I have a pack of these film burn clips, and
all I did was add one over and then fade it out at the end, and that was it. So, I literally just cut, boom, to this, and
I think that's what ended up in the cut. Now, these colors that are in this film burn
clip are really cool, but they're colors that are not really seen anywhere else in the piece,
so I did another version, an alt version, where I desaturated the film burn. I just tinted it black and white so that why
it would match the style of the documentary a little bit more. And I rendered these, when I gave these to
Ian, I rendered them without this shot on actually because I knew he was probably gonna
need to color correct that, and I gave him instructions to add this clip on top of your
shot, and then once you get to this part you can just cut and go to this full frame and
it will work perfectly for you. Alright, and so I did a couple of other versions. So this was, right, here's another version
of the title where the type doesn't come on separately. It comes on at the same time. I thought that might be a way to get this
effect to actually work, because then you don't have to take extra time to wait for
the type to reveal on. If you look at r3, right, it takes longer
because the type is delayed before it comes on. I think it looks neat, but I think you really
need an extra two, three seconds if you're gonna use this title, and by the time I was
brought into this it was probably already too late. So, that is why I ended up doing a simpler
version for Ian, and that's a very, very smart thing to do. As motion graphics artists it can kill you
a little bit. Like this is the kind of stuff I like to do. It's really neat. It's really cool and interesting looking,
but I knew it may not be what my client needed. So, I had to provide this alternate version
that was simpler, and that's the one that ended up going in the cut, but that's okay. Cool, so that was the title shot, and then
the very last thing I needed to do was I was given this photo of sort of the two main guys
in the band from a long time ago. It was one those things where it was like,
"Oh, we need you to put a move on this still." Now, I literally had like 10, 15 minutes left
at this point. I wasn't gonna cut him out and do a full 3D
treatment of this. I just didn't have time. So, what I did was I used one of my favorite
plugins, Magic Bullet Looks, and I just built up a little bit of a look with some, some
lens distortion, stuff like that, and the lens distortion, I hit it pretty hard, okay? And if I RAM preview this, let me go to half
res and I'll do every other frame RAM preview, look at the edge here. That lens distortion, what it does is it makes
things move a lot faster at the edge of the frame than it does in the middle, and even
though there is no parallax, there is no 3D in this scene, you sort of get a little bit
of a 3D feel. It makes it feel a little more interesting. If I turn the treatment off and just show
you the original, this is just the original move on the still if you do nothing to it,
and just adding Magic Bullet Looks and tweaking the look a little bit, by the way, you don't
need Magic Bullet Looks. It's just such a fun plugin to play with. It's really good for color correction and
doing stuff like this. But, it gives it a little bit more production
value. And then I did a few different versions, one
with a little bit more of a blur on the edge. I did one here where at the beginning there
was a little bit of that film flash. I love to give my clients options because,
there's many reasons, but the main reason is by giving your client options you're forcing
them to think a little bit harder about what it is they like about one over the other,
and if you just show them one thing then they are in this weird position where they may
like it but they may think, "Well, I can't just say it's done. "I need to say something. "I need to tweak something." Give 'em options and generally that goes away. And in fact, when I sent all this stuff over
to Ian, that was it. He just used it. Part of that was probably because he didn't
have time for me to do any revisions, but I think also it's because I gave him all these
tools, he was able to go through and pick out what he needed, okay? So, let's take a look at the actual video
and how these things got used. - My name is Ian McFarland, and I'm directing
The Godfathers of Hardcore. This film is about two of the most respected
individuals in underground music. - [Joey] A few days after launching this promo
video, the campaign got fully funded. $15,000 was the original goal, but now Ian
has added stretch goals, and the rewards are really, really amazing and they've raised
even more money. So there you go, a successful project and
hopefully a semi interesting lesson in using After Effects to very, very quickly make your
client happy with no revisions.
