Old Film Style in After Effects

fill a banner here with video school online.com and another After Effects tutorial I'm gonna show you how you can get the old film style look right with an after effect I'm gonna show you nine different ways that you can do this kind of effect and you'll be able to combine them to use them all to create your own unique old film style let's head into After Effects and learn how alright so I'm here in After Effects and we're going to be using this clip that I shot in downtown San Dimas so it's actually perfect timing this old Ford car drove by so it except for these cars in the background and some of the modern conveniences in the background this looks like the perfect clip to add this old film style to so the steps we're going to be going over are here right now so you have your black and white or sepia which is your color effect we're gonna be adding some contrast adding grain scratches dust vignette wiggle and flicker both of these are great for that old sort of projection style and then frame and like I said in the intro you're able to combine these different effects to create your own unique look you might not want to use all of these but I do want to show you how all of them combined can create a cool effect like this alright so I've created a new composition with this clip right here which is just a regular video clip it might be something that you're working on your own you can use your own clip so let's go ahead and set that up I'm also going to be showing you how to do this using adjustment layers which is great because you can easily copy and paste adjustment layers such as I do here from this composition to this composition and it automatically applies all of these effects to the new clip that being said there's other ways you can apply these effects you can apply them directly to the clip you can combine all of these or most of these to a single adjustment layer to make it a lot easier I just I'm going to do it on separate adjustment layers so that it's easy for you to understand alright so the first one we're going to do is changing the color to black and white or sepia so I'm going to create a new adjustment layer up here going up to layer new adjustment layer or on that would be option command y so we have this new layer I'm going to rename it so we know we're gonna call this color so in our effects and presets the easiest one would just be the hue/saturation effect so type in hue and under color correction you have the hue saturation I'm gonna apply that to this layer right here quickly dropping the master saturation down would get you a black and white image or if you click the colorize and then we adjust the colorize hue to something like 32 33 or so somewhere right around 30 to 35 you get this cool sepia tone you can increase or decrease the saturation of the color eyes to make it more colorful so that's kind of the first step to get this sort of effect it already looks pretty good so the next step is to add some contrast so again I'm going to add a new adjustment layer for me that's option command Y on a PC that would be alt control Y I believe so check me if I'm wrong comment in the comments below if it's something else so I'm gonna call this contrast and the easiest way is with brightness contrast or the curves effect so I'm gonna type in curves and apply this curves effect here and then I'm just going to create a little contrast curve by bringing down the darks and up the highlights and this is just something that is typical of old film you get a little bit higher contrast not as much dynamic range you lose some of the information in the blacks and the highlights but that looks pretty good cool so that's the next step after this is to add some grain so as always I'm going to add a new adjustment layer rename this to grain so I know what I'm working with and then in the effects and presets you actually have an add grain effect so if I drop that down here now what you'll notice is that you don't see the grain automatically applied and that's because the viewing mode is set to preview which means it's only set to this little box right here we can move this box around if you drop down the preview region and drag left or right we can make it bigger by increasing the width and height of the preview region or you can just drop this preview viewing mode up here and choose final output to see it on everything here you can adjust the size and intensity of your grain there's all kinds of other things you can do with animation speed which adjust the sort of animation of the grain popping in and out the blend mode the color I would say make it monochromatic because this is black and white so definitely under color check monochromatic for the intensity in size you might want to increase this or decrease this according to your style but I'll let you play around with that but it's hard for you to see here on this video but I'm sure if you're following along if you turn on and off this effect you can see that it actually is applying grain now bear in mind the more effects you add the more intensive it's going to be for your computer to render and play it out I'm previewing Ewing this at a third resolution so that I can actually play through this depending on your computer you might not even be able to do that or maybe you can go up to full resolution and play through it but the more effects you apply the harder it's going to be that being said when you're done you probably do want to render out and preview it at full quality to see what it actually looks alright so the next one is scratches so scratches and dust these are really cool effects that we're going to be adding next so as always option command Y to create a new adjustment layer I'm going to add scratches so with scratches I'm actually going to use the fractal noise effect so under noise and grain if you type in fractal you get fractal noise so drop this down on to our scratches layer so the first thing you'll notice is that now it's this complete cloudy black-and-white image so for now that's totally fine so that we can see what we're doing but eventually we're going to change the blend mode so that we can see the image behind so first with the contrast boost that contrast is something like 250 and then the brightness to negative 100 and that's just going to basically decrease the amount of scratches we're going to see now under the transform properties we're going to adjust the scale right now we want to uncheck uniform scaling and for the width we're going to set to one and then to the height we're going to increase so for me I'm going to increase it a lot something like five thousand between 5,000 and 10,000 is usually pretty good alright so now we have basically this line this set of line right here what we want to do is actually animate this line and one of the easiest ways you can do that is with an expression that you add to the evolution so if I rotate this evolution you can see that these dust these scratches actually move which is kind of cool you get that scratch effect you could set a keyframe and just rotate this and set another keyframe to animate it or you can actually add an expression to this to automatically basically adjust so how you do that is by option clicking the stopwatch next to the evolution or alt clicking if you're on a PC that opens up this effect with the expression editor down here in the timeline so delete all of that or just type in x times so time x it's a little asterisk button 200 so that's going to automatically animate these scratches like so the higher you go the faster it's going to animate so again you can play around with what you like now lastly we want to change the blend mode so that we can see what's behind it if you don't see this mode column just click the toggle switches modes button here switch the mode to add and now we can see what's behind you may want to decrease the opacity of this layer too so press T to bring up opacity with this layer selected and drop that down to something like 50 or so or 25 if you want to have it blend even more cool so now we want to add our next step which is dust which is going to be using the same sort of effect so what we can actually do is just duplicate this layer by selecting it and pressing command D on a PC that would be ctrl D and rename we'll call this dust five dust alright so now what we basically have to change let's turn it back to normal the blend mode and let's take the opacity up so we can see it now if we go back down to transform properties and we change the height to uniform scaling so it's at 100 now we have basically this dust we still have the time evolution that's animating it which is pretty cool but we can also change how it looks I think there's a little bit too much dust so I'm actually going to decrease the brightness just something like negative 200 to see if that was too much negative 150 if you just want a little bit of dust that's pretty good maybe negative 125 yeah that's pretty good and then you can also for this one I would go into the time evolution settings again and so if we drop down our dust menu drop down our effects fractal noise drop down our evolution we can get into this menu I'm going to multiply this by 500 so that it's happening a little bit faster I think that looks more like actual dust on an old film okay so now let's go back and change our blend mode to add and then again we can drop the overall opacity of this entire layer pressing T drop this down to something like 50 depending on how you like it so that is we're getting there this is really awesome a lot of cool things that you can do next we're going to add a vignette so for this one we're actually going to not use an adjustment layer we're going to use a new solid so go up to layer new solid or just press command Y or ctrl Y and make sure it's black and select okay to quickly create a vignette go to the ellipse tool up here which is your shape tool just holding click ellipse and double click ellipse to get this perfect circle or ellipse for your composition next we want to go to this mask setting underneath this layer and change 4 add to subtract or if you want you can just leave it on adding choose inverted while I'm down here I'm going to rename this to vignette vignette cool so now that's a very hard vignette so let's play around with some of the mask settings so if you drop down the mass settings let's increase the feathering and also decrease the mask opacity or you could just decrease the opacity of the overall mask layer or the vignette layer itself you can also increase or decrease the expansion to make it sort of the center smaller or larger so adding in a vignette like that also makes it a little more like old style film cool so that is our vignette so you can see as we go we've added color contrast green scratches dust and now I've been yet which really takes it to that next level so these next ones are really additional ones that take it to a really other level and this is more for that projector style look so first with wiggle so we want to use this as an adjustment layer so again option command Y I'm gonna call this wiggle okay so what I actually want to do is wiggle the video beneath the actual video and I'm not gonna wiggle the vignette or anything beneath this I just want to do it to the video itself so I'm actually gonna put wiggle right above our video layer down here now notice that what I want to do is actually change the position and I want to move it back and forth up and down really quickly but if I do that here under the transform tools nothing happens and that's because the transform properties of this adjustment layer aren't affecting what's beneath it what we need to do is add an effect that will then apply to what's beneath it so there's actually a transform effect under distort that we can apply to the wiggle layer now and now notice that if I move the layer the position up here in the transform tools left right up or down it's applying to the video layer beneath it so now we have this transform effect and what we want to do is animate the position so we want to actually go in and we can do that with an expression because we don't want to again be animating it with keyframes by option clicking the position here the stopwatch in the transform effect make sure you're not doing it to the position down here in the transform if you are working in the timeline make sure you go to the transform tool down here under effects and then option click position now type in a popular expression called wiggle so wiggle open parenthesis 25 comma 1.5 and then close that those parentheses and what this says is that we're telling after-effects to wiggle this clip or anything underneath it the position 25 times a second one point by 1.5 pixels so up down left or right so if I click off and then play through this you'll see that now there's a little bit of jitter and wiggle to this clip to make it extreme if I make this just five instead of 1.5 you can see it even more so you can play around maybe you want something like two that looks a little bit more natural to you the thing you have to be careful about now though is if I turn off the transparency grid and I go through this what I've actually done before which I shouldn't have done is the scale of this video clip is that 102 if the scale of your video is set to 100 what happens is as it Wiggles you might see some transparency to the left or right or the very top of this so it's very hard for you to see let me change this to 10 so you can see as an extreme over here on the right hand side see how the background now is just transparent it Wiggles around and if you export this the sides are going to be completely black which is probably something that you don't want so if you are doing something like who for example what you want to do to your video clip down below is increase the scale to like 102 or something so that even though it's moving around you're not getting any transparency around the edges so I know that's a little bit confusing but just I wanted to just make sure that you knew about that in case you export and you're like wondering why the edges don't look good anymore cool so that's the wiggle effect and next we're going to add the sort of projector flicker so we're going to add another adjustment layer we're gonna also put this right above the video layer itself and not above everything else I'll call this Flickr and this time we're going to animate the opacity again we can't do it under the transform properties of this layer so we have to add this effect and then we're going to add an expression to this effect for opacity so option clicking the stopwatch under opacity again we're using wiggle so wiggle doesn't necessarily mean position it just means sort of wiggle the the number or the value of whatever setting you're using so for example if we do wiggle 25 times a second by let's say 90 what's gonna happen is that the opacity is going to go up or down anywhere between 90 points or it's not pixels but for opacity it's kind of like percentage 25 times so if I turn this transparency off you can see what's happening now that's way too much we don't want anything like that so I'm going to drop the 9b down to something like 10 still that's kind of a lot and maybe the wiggle is just a little bit too much so let's go 10 and then 5 see what that looks like and that's pretty good maybe going out back up to 25 5 so you again see you can play around with this to get your own sort of custom projection fill flicker using this wiggle effect but just remember that the first number is the amount of times it's adjusting per second and then the second number is value that's changing so we're changing by five and you can see that with the opacity here it's at 98 197 so it's only going to go down at maximum to 95 so if you want it to go down even more that's when you would want to increase this value to something like 10 okay so this first is the speed the second is the value so that's our flicker and then the last thing I'm going to do is this frame option now I created this cool sort of frame here with this edge using a brush stroke animation effect so we're going to show you how to do that now so first we want to similar to what we did with the vignette add a new solid layer so for me I'm just going to press command Y or go up to layer new solid black is fine so this one I'm putting on top of all these other layers and I have renamed it to frame and now up with our shape tool I'm changing from ellipse to rounded rectangle and again I'm going to double click this so it creates the sort of rounded rectangle mask I'm going to invert it so it's just the outside and I'm going to go down into our mask and drop the expansion to something like this so we just have this border around in your effects and presets if you type in brush under stylize you have brush strokes and I'm gonna drop this on to this frame so basically this kind of creates this sort of scratchy so it looks like it could be a film frame or something around the edge now it's not perfect though if I click off this you can see that it doesn't go completely to the edge so what you might want to do is with the actual shape of the layer itself or with the mask just play around with the scale so under the transform tools I might unlock the constrain proportions for scale and increase the Y property of the scale so that we don't have as much the top and bottom frame but we do have the left and right frame and then maybe just increase the left and right just a little bit you can also adjust the style of the brush increasing the brush size here using the brush size the stroke length to increase or decrease the size of this frame all these other kind of effects you can play around with to get your own style now this frame it's I'll be honest it's not the best frame look you might want to go out and actually get some sort of image or PNG that you find online to create sort of a frame itself but in a pinch it's something that you can play around with now with this one the randomness and the animation is really fast so I'm gonna decrease that to something like point two for the stroke randomness and then I'm also going to again increase the scale up and down so that it's only showing on the edges really and then you can play around with the order of these things too maybe putting the frame underneath the vignette is better and maybe even underneath all of these except for wiggle and flicker so that all the other dust and scratches everything's applied on top of it so those are nine ways that you can get a more old style old film style to your after effects videos remember them black and white contrast adding grain scratches dust vignette wiggle flicker and then adding a frame to them and actually with this frame now that I mentioned this you might not even need the brushstroke maybe you just want sort of an frame like this a complete black frame maybe adding something like a blur something like a Gaussian blur or let's type in Gaussian to just get a blurred out frame might be something that looks better to you it's kind of in addition to the vignette it's a more boarder that frames your image anyways I'm gonna leave it at that I know this was a long tutorial but I hope you enjoyed it if you have any questions about any of these effects or anything else make sure you hit me up in the comments below and make sure you subscribe to the channel to get all of our latest after effects tutorials and other videos that help you become a better creator well I hope you really enjoyed this tutorial and if you did please like and subscribe to the channel for more if you have any questions or comments you can leave them below in the comments and if you're looking to take your skills to the next level make sure you head over to video school online.com where we have premium courses more free tutorials and articles guides and all kinds of stuff that will help you become a better creator thanks so much for watching and have a beautiful day [Music]

Channel: Video School

Views: 14,252

Keywords: video school online, phil ebiner, after effects old film effect, old film, old film effect, old film look, adobe after effects, old film look after effects, old movie effect, damaged film, old film effects, after effects, old film effect after effects, old film effect in after effects, after effects old film look, film look, vintage film

Id: 3rerLib20Pg

Length: 22min 50sec (1370 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 11 2018