This video is brought to you
by Storyblocks Video [Music] Oh, hey guys! [Cinecom's intro music] Hey folks, Jordy here for cinecom.net
and welcome to Copy Cat Friday, a weekly series in which we recreate effects from famous films
and music videos. Today we're having a look at the
opening credits of the film ‘Limitless’. It's an older film from 2011 but that doesn't take away the incredible
effect we see in the beginning. And we're gonna recreate
that infinite zoom today and show you guys how it's done. Now, there's gonna be a basic idea behind
the effect and an advanced technique. Both will be covered in this tutorial. Unfortunately, guys, we weren't able
to make a long example of the advanced technique
since Lorenzo is sick and Yannick is in the hospital today. And I have no idea what I'm doing here. So give Lorenzo and Yannick
some love in the comments below. Now, let’s start with a quick moment
to thank our sponsor Storyblocks Video. It’s an online library driven by
a strong community of filmmakers that share high-quality stock clips
up to 4k resolution. there are also effects like transitions,
lens flares, sparks, smoke and more. Or maybe check out
the After Effects templates to create stunning visuals in seconds. To start downloading unlimited
video assets go ahead and click that first link
in the description below. [Music] For this effect we did some research and I found out that the
original makers from the effect used a tripod set up with 3 RED cameras. Well, we're also going to do that, but
we're gonna do that later in the video. Now we're gonna use photos. And we're gonna do that so that
everybody can participate. The subject that we are
photographing are long streets, because we need distance for this effect. We’re gonna start off with a tele lens, because we found out this was
much easier to frame the subject. Then we're gonna move down
to the medium lens and then to the wide lens. Now place your camera
and start taking pictures. [Music] So the idea is that you take
3 pictures of a long street. One is a wide-angle, then a medium
and finally a zoomed in or tele shot. Like Yannick said, this is not how
they did it in the film ‘Limitless’. The editing process will be
exactly the same, though. Only the shooting itself
is a little bit different which we'll get into by
the end of the video. Now the basic idea could theoretically
be recreated inside Premiere Pro and we were actually looking
for a way to do it in there, but it's such a big hassle that we
had to create it inside After Effects. What you want to do is start with your first
wide shot in the bottom of your timeline. On top of there goes your
medium shot and finally the tele shot. And this continues. If you have multiple scenes, you can place the pictures of your
next locations on top of there as well. But again, start with the wide angle, then
to the normal lens and finally the long lens. Once you got everything in your timeline
you could disable all the layers except for the bottom one,
which is your starting shot. Scale this clip so that it matches with
the resolution of your composition. You can then go ahead and
enable the layer on top of that and scale plus reposition so that
it matches with the bottom layer. If you have trouble matching it, you could
set your opacity for a moment to 50%, then when you got it in place
bring it back to 100. Since we're gonna have to match
multiple of these layers together, we’re gonna parent the bottom layer to
the one on top using the Pick Whip tool. Whenever I scale and reposition
the medium shot now, the wide-angle shot will just follow along. And just like we started, we will now
scale up this medium lens shot. Some of you might be familiar
with this technique and that is because Andrew Kramer
from Video Copilot actually showed the same
technique on an earth zoom effect. It’s an older tutorial from him
but still amazingly good. I'm gonna leave a link to it
in the description below. So, Andrew, thank you so much
for that inspiration. Moving on, we are now going to
enable the long lens shot and scale plus reposition it
on the medium lens shot. When it sits in place you parent
the layer below it. Then scale the layer back up
and continue this process. And after three shots of the same location you could place three new shots here
of a different location if you like so, again scale the clip to match it
with the one below, parent the bottom clip and scale back up. Just keep doing this for
as long as you want to, or as many shots as you have, of course. But when you're done with everything, we’re going to have to define the
point where we are going to zoom into. To do that we are first going to select all
of the layers except for the one on top. Then take the Pick Whip tool
and parent everything to the top layer. We’re gonna use this layer
as the animation controller, but since we're going to
zoom in from such a huge distance, our anchor point has to be very precise. So from the Options of your canvas
locate the Grid and Guides button, and enable the Title Safe Area. And this will add a cross
in the middle of your shot. Now, using the Anchor Point tool we can now move the anchor point of the
top layer on the same spot as that cross. You can scroll to zoom in to make
sure that it sits perfectly in place. All right, we can now go ahead
and create our animation. And since we're already
sitting at that ending position, I’m going to create a keyframe for the scale
and place that keyframe further in time. Then go back in time and change
the scale value to 0.001. And this is gonna depend on
the amount of shots that you have, so try a few values here until
you see your first shot in full frame. Now since we're crossing
such a huge animation which is gonna be linear by default, you will notice that the start
will go super fast. So we're going to have to turn our
animation into an exponential scale. And you can do this by
selecting both the keyframes, right-click on them and then choose
Keyframe Assistant: Exponential Scale. After Effects will then create
the exponential animation for you. And this brings us to the last step, while scrubbing through the animation
we will still see the individual photos. But to blend them better together
we're going to mask them. For example this layer right here. You can double click on the rectangle
mask tool to apply a mask on it. From the mask options change
the feather to around 300 and the mask expansion to -300 so that you definitely don't see
the edges anymore. Do this for all of the layers. Some shots might require you to go
to a landmark, such as this bridge. What helps here is to disable your layer but keep it selected while
you're creating your mask. Here you wanna mask around
the inside of the bridge. As a final touch you might want
to color correct the individual photos, if they don't match with their surrounding. Now, I like to use this simple
curves effect for that, as it gives me great control
over the contrast. And that's it. [Music] Now let's also have a look at
how you can do this with video. Essentially you want to set up
three cameras very close to each other on a tripod. One has a wide angle lens,
the other one has a medium lens and the last one a tele lens. Simply record all of them together
and, yeah, that's it. So, instead of taking separate shots, you’re doing it on the same
moment now. In post-production the process
is gonna be exactly the same, only here we're working with video clips. And that was it again for
Copy Cat Friday! Thank you all so much for watching, make sure to not only
hit that subscribe button, but also the bell next to it so that you stay
notified whenever we upload new videos. Thank you Storyblocks as well for support, and as always: Stay Creative! -…a weekly series in which
we recreate effects… …that was Google. Hey, Google, play the number one song. I'm curious… That appears to be the
number one song currently.
