PRACTICAL EFFECTS 101

welcome back to the channel this week we are talking about practical effects [Music] so practical effects are essentially just special effects that are created physically here in the real world they're shot in camera without the use of cgi or computer generated imagery that's what cgi stands for now practical effects are great because generally they're going to be quicker and less expensive to produce than hiring a cgi person to cgi the exact same effect granted cgi is used a ton nowadays in movies shows and commercials but for the types of stuff that a lot of us do here on social media it can often be more convenient to be able to pull off an effect on your own in camera but what is especially cool about practical effects nowadays is that they are evolving and people are coming up with new genius ways to pull off effects that we have never really seen in years past for example the bottle cap flip shot that i got a year ago typically a shot like this could easily be achieved using 3d modeling in cgi software a lot of you made sure to let me know that so thank you but the thing is i don't know how to cgi and i don't really have the time to learn how to cgi especially in the midst of a client project and to be completely honest i didn't want to have to pay extra money to hire somebody to cgi that one shot for me and that my friends is where practical effects come in now to achieve a practical effect like that bottle cap flip a traditional production house more than likely would have used some really expensive slo-mo cameras and robots with algorithms to literally launch that bottle cap through the air and follow it with perfect precision and accuracy but of course most of us do not have these kinds of resources or that kind of money for that matter which means we need to get creative and the way i was able to achieve this practical effect without those ultra expensive solutions is by using what i like to call a hybrid practical effect in a nutshell all i had to do was glue the bottle cap to a toothpick and film it while it spins around i then took that footage and with some basic editing techniques i was able to make it appear as though the bottle cap was flying through the air and all of the footage for this effect is completely shot in camera there is absolutely no cgi just a little bit of masking and keyframing all done within final cut and similarly for a vodka soda ad i made last summer i composited together this flying can shot by using real footage of three cans and three orange slices all shot in camera now what's cool about this hybrid method is that it can be done on any camera in pretty much any editing software and it allows us to think outside the box when it comes to creating content all right so here we are in the kitchen we're going to be getting a shot to demonstrate a couple of practical effects that you could do pretty much on any camera and any editing software and here we've got a sodastream bottle and a sodastream bubbly flavoring not being paid by bubbly or sodastream this is just what i have lying around in my kitchen so we're going to use it for this example shot got some lemons here for a pop of color as well as skewers and fishing wire now what i didn't know about fishing wire is that you can actually buy them in different thicknesses this right here is a really thick fishing wire this is good for moving heavy objects and this is a thin fishing wire which is a little bit easier to hide this is the one we're going to be going with today and in most cases for tabletop work you'd probably use a thinner fishing wire so the first thing i'm going to do is start setting up my shot in a way that i think looks good and then we're going to go from there get our sodastream bottle in the background some lemons and then our bubbly will go somewhere around there and i'm also just going to grab one more lemon for a garnish i'm gonna cut it much thicker than you probably normally would for a typical cocktail and that is because for a practical effect we'll be putting a skewer through this and there we go that's a pretty thick lemon slice but that'll be perfect for putting a skewer through it for our effect so we're just gonna grab one of our bamboo skewers here these are from the dollar store and i'm gonna find the thick part of our lemon and i'm just gonna poke this through and there we go that's our lemon lollipop right there we're also gonna cut a slice in this wedge so that we could put it on the rim of the glass i think we want to show i think we want to show that side so i'm going to put the slice somewhere right there just like so and we're just going to put that on the rim of our glass boom take care brush your hair so that is our first practical effect all set up now we want to do another effect on our little bubbly thing right there so here's our thin fishing wire we don't need too much of it just maybe i don't know foot or two feet cut it with our scissors and this right here is clear double-sided adhesive this is what we're going to be using to stick the fishing wire onto the bottom of our bubbly flavoring here so i'm just going to cut out a small section of this like so probably go even smaller go about half that we take the fishing wire and stick it to the underside of that double-sided adhesive like so and now if we stick it to the bottom here we get an effect where if we pull it away it just kind of slides in and slides out that's all right but i want it to have a little bit of a twirl so i think i'm actually going to stick it onto the back kind of side of it that way when you pull it it gives us a spin and that right there is what we want see how it spins as we pull it away and now all we have to do is peel off that top layer of our double-sided adhesive and that leaves it completely clear so that you don't see it in the shot now we're just going to fill up the cup with ice using real ice today because it's just one shot now we're going to pour some of this in here make sure everything else is nice and dry and clean almost forgot to put on the lid and we're just going to make our final adjustments on our frame and we are ready to get our shot and very carefully i'm just going to grab this skewer and remove the lemon and then i'll grab the fishing wire as you can see here and just pull the bubbly away so once we've got our shot creating the effect is pretty straightforward so here's what the shot looks like unedited as you can see the lemon comes off of the rim of the glass using our skewer and then the bubbly bottle spins out of the frame and that was done using that fishing wire we're gonna start by reversing the clip and because it was shot in 60 frames per second i can slow it down to 40 percent currently those two movements of the lemon slice and the bottle spin happen independently but i do want them to occur at the same time so to do this i'm just going to simply make a cut right before the lemon flies in drag the second half of the clip over top of the first half and then set the opacity to 50 so i can see both clips at the same time from here i can just line up the two clips so that our effects happen simultaneously and then cut both clips at the 5 second mark next i'll turn the opacity of the top clip back up to 100 and then use the draw mask tool to isolate the lemon slice in that top clip also making sure that the skewer is no longer visible and then using keyframes i'll track the slice backwards frame by frame making adjustments to our mask until the lemon is out of the shot here's what we got so far and it looks pretty cool but wait a second the water in both the glass and the bottle looks really flat hypothetically if this were a real ad for a carbonated drink you would definitely want to see that fizz so we do need to fix this we're going to fix this in post by heading over to our sponsor story blocks and then searching for fizz this one right here should work perfectly so i'll go ahead and download that i'll add this bubble overlay that we just downloaded in between our two clips so that it's underneath the lemon slice that we masked out and the next step is to resize it so that it matches the height of the liquid in the bottle now using the draw mask tool once again i can cut out the fizz in the shape of the bottle and then feather it in a little bit and then switch the blend mode to add so this does look a little bit better but it is quite unrealistic because the bottle is already in the background of the shot and it's out of focus anyway we definitely don't want the bubbles inside the bottle to be in focus while the bottle is out of focus so what i'll do is i'll add a gaussian blur effect and dial it back to about 20 and from here i can also turn down the opacity of our bubbles to just 15 and this is what we get now to get our fizz inside the glass it's more or less the same process only making the bubbles a little bit smaller and not as out of focus and that my friends is just one of many ways that stock footage can save your videos storyblocks is an online subscription service and with a membership plan you get unlimited downloads of high quality royalty-free stock footage this also includes motion backgrounds after effects templates and of course overlays like our bubbles if you are ever in need of some video assets to help tell your story whether that's a quick drone shot a film burn or a time lapse then head down to the link in the description below or go to storyblocks.com daniel schiffer to learn more and finally the last step to complete our effect is to add a color grade and a zoom in optional is masking out that fishing wire if it is still visible in your footage and here is the final result [Music] well i hope you enjoyed this video all about practical effects if you've got any cool practical effects that you've been working on and you'd like to show me then feel free to send me them on instagram daniel.schiffer and i will see you guys in the next video

Channel: Daniel Schiffer

Views: 301,190

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Id: zihOC7Cl370

Length: 9min 5sec (545 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 30 2021