RUDY MANCUSO (Stories From Our Future) AFTER EFFECTS Tutorial

bhadra 0 Comments June 28, 2019 After Effects

This video is brought to you by Storyblocks Video Oh, it’s 5 o’clock, the end of the work day. It was a busy day today. Guys? Guys, what are you doing? Ah, their battery is out again. it’s always the same with these guys. Yep, out of battery. Guys, look, it’s really simple: Lorenzo, you plug-in Yannick when he’s low on power, Yannick, you plug-in Lorenzo when he is low on power. It’s that simple! Guys? Oh, man, these guys are really out of juice! Come on! Alright, see you guys tomorrow. Oh, hey folks it’s Jordy here for cinecom.net and welcome to Copy Cat Friday, The weekly series in which we recreate effects from famous films and music videos. Interesting, the number one spot on the YouTube trending page this week was Rudy Mancuso who is actually just a YouTube creator. But Rudy created a very nice series in collaboration with Lele Pons and Juanpa Zurita. I’m gonna be honest, I don’t follow those creators.

But I just came across them through the trending page and it’s really cool what they made. He directed three episodes in a series they called ‘Stories from our future’. Which is an homage to ‘Black Mirror’, the Netflix series. It’s a really cool series, guys, I’m gonna leave a link to their playlist in the description below. But only watch that after this video, of course. Now we’re here today to have a look at the visuals in this series. And there are dozens of very cool visual effects. And we took some of the more easy effects from it that we believe also have the most valuable tips and tricks to it. We’re gonna do everything inside Adobe After Effects and if you’re new to After Effects, definitely check out our beginners course, guys, which has been getting tremendously positive reviews. Again, linked below. And now before we start I’d like to make a quick shout-out to our sponsor Storyblocks Video.

Storyblocks is an online library that we almost use on a daily basis, because we can find 4k studio quality stock clips in there, effects, overlays, visuals, transitions and even After Effects templates. The amazing thing about this library is that there is only a single fee, which allows you to download unlimited video assets for an entire year, without having to pay extra. So, for more information make sure to click that first link in the description below. Let’s start with the first effect which is gonna be a hologram effect. Now, we’re actually gonna film this the following: you have your camera on a tripod and have the first talent wave his hand.

Then a second guy waves his hand, and finally you shoot an empty. In Adobe After Effects we would use the rotor brush to key out the hands, but either we suck at rotoscoping or the tool just doesn’t work, so we got back the next day and shot the two hands with a green-screen. So, now we could roughly mask the inside of the green screen and then apply the key light presets to it to remove the green. So that gives you an empty shot on the bottom, one keyed out hand on top and another keyed out hand on top of that. Now, at the point where the two hands cross, we’re gonna animate the current mask so that it bites a little bit into the hands. Enable Animation for your mask, move forward in time and pull it a little bit over the hand, then go forward in time again and expand to the mask back.

I’m gonna add a little bit of feather to this mask as well. Now the glitch itself is something that we could make entirely inside After Effects, but that would be pretty stupid since we can just download a stock clip of some TV static. We used Storyblocks for that because this here is commercial work and there’s just a lot that we can find in the library. But, of course, you can also scout the web for a free clip. Place that in your composition as well. And now the static needs to have the same shape as your hand. So, we’re gonna duplicate our hand and place the duplication above the stock clip. We’re gonna use this duplication as a mask for the TV static. And that I can simply do by setting the track matte to ‘alpha matte’. And bada boom bada bam, there we have it! Now the static glitch is kind of everywhere, so I’m first going to draw a mask on it, so that it only covers the tips of my fingers.

Then, like before, animate that mask so that it comes in and out. Again, feather the mask a little bit and that’s it. If you like, you could also play around with the blending modes of the glitch to make them be more part of your hand. But essentially this is the effect which goes exactly the same in the other hand. Moving on to sci-fi effect number 2, which is gonna be the battery level on your neck.

And I’ve got some really good tips to share right here. For starters, you wanna make sure that you have something to track the motion, like a pimple. If your neck is clean you could always add two dots in there with a permanent marker. It has to be permanent, really important. Then in After Effects we’re gonna grab the tracker window and click on ‘track motion’. You can also check the scale and rotation which is gonna give you two tracking points. Place them over the marking dots. Then hit ‘track forward’ and let After Effects do its thing. When it’s done you’re gonna go to the menu, select layer, new null object. And this is a ‘nothing object’ but we can use it to store the tracking data in.

So, click on ‘edit target’ from the tracker window and make sure that the null object is selected. You can then click on ‘apply’. And that null object will now follow along with your movement. We can now go ahead and create a text but we’re not just gonna type a text in there. We’re gonna create a very simple expression, you don’t need to do this but it will give you much more control plus you’re gonna learn something really cool. Yeah, Fortnight it’s not cool anymore, all the cool kids write expressions now. That’ll put you in the popular group. Alright, start off with searching for the slider controlling your effect, and drag that to the text. The slider does nothing, the only thing it does is output a value, but we can use that value.

Expand the text property, and you want to see the slider control plus the source text. Then alt-click on the source text stopwatch which will open up a text field. For starters, you want to use the pick whip from the expression control and link it to the slider. When you click away now you’ll notice that your text will display the value of the slider as you move it around. But we also have the number after the comma, so, go back into the expression and before the text start writing Match.float( and then go to the end of everything and add a closed bracket. And that is gonna remove everything behind the comma.

Now a number alone is not enough, so after the current text type in +. then quote and type a text in there, for example ‘% battery’. And again, quote. and that’s it. We can now animate the slider property and that will animate the number inside that text layer. So now you can go ahead and reposition your text onto the neck of the cyborg and you can set the layer to 3D to rotate it better in place.

Once you’re done use the pick whip of the layer to parent it to the null object. This will take the tracking data from it and you’ll notice now that your text will follow the movements. Now, in order to make the text to be more part of the skin, or actually lay under the skin, we’re gonna need to do a few things. Starting off, I’m going to duplicate the normal clip. Make sure that it lays under the text because, just like before, I’m going to change the track match to ‘alpha’ so that the skin takes the text as a template.

Now you don’t see the text now because it has the same look as your bottom layer, the skin. So what we can do now is add a hue and saturation effect to the duplicate. Changing the hue now will reveal your text. You can now pick any color you’d like and maybe increase the lightness some more to make it pop. What also helps is to change the blending mode of that layer to ‘screen’ or ‘add’. And now comes the final step. From the Effects Library take the ‘roughen edges’ and place that onto the text layer. This effect allows us to bite a little bit into the edges of the text by increasing the border. You can fine-tune this more with the other setting below. And finally, we’re going to add a glow effect to it as well. Change the three settings above so that you get a gentle glow around the text.

And that’s it! Bada boom, bada bam! Yep, out of battery. This video is getting long but I’m sure that you’re learning a ton of new things, so, the last sci-fi effect, which is the easiest of them all is that eye glow thing. That glow thing are essentially just some shapes that we animate it to rotate it around a little bit. There’s nothing more to it. Adding a ‘hue & saturation’ effect to the elements we can check ‘colorize’ and animate the color hue to make them change colors.

Then add a ‘glow’ effect to them and finally a ‘Gaussian blur’ to extend that glow and get rid of the hard edges. I’m going fast over this because it’s nothing more than that. Plus it takes a little time to explain since there are so many different elements and it’s basically all the same. For those who would like, we’ve actually rendered this out and you can download this for free from that link in the description below. Alright, now create a new composition in which you can place your normal clip and the ‘eye glow’ effect clip or its composition if you created it yourself. Just like before we’re starting off with a motion tracking of the eyeball. And this time only the position is enough.

When you’re done you want to save the tracking data again into a null object. Then reposition and scale the eye glow into that eye and parent it to the null layer. With the eye glow effect thingy selected, take the pen tool and draw a mask around your eyeball, and that way the glow effect thingy doesn’t come on your eyelids. If your eyelids move around too much you might want to enable animation for the mask path and adjust it over time. Now you can change the blending mode of that layer to ‘add’, but it might not do much if your talent has dark eyes. So, you might want to add another glow effect to this layer just to make it give a little bit more light. If the effect is too prominent, make sure to decrease the opacity of the layer a little bit. And that’s it! You can do the same thing for every eye now. And those were the 3 sci-fi effects from the youtube series ‘Stories from our future’. Now, we didn’t explain the digital clock as we eventually notice that it would be a 10-minute video in itself, but if you guys really want to learn how we did that then let us know in the comments below and we might make a future video about it.

Thank you so much for watching, thank you Storyblocks Video for the support. And as always: Stay Creative! Oh, man, you’re really out of juice! Lorenzo, you plug in Yannick when he’s low on power… don’t laugh, Yannick. Yannick, you plug in Lorenzo when he’s low on power. Come on! Guys? Guys? .

As found on Youtube