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[Music]
Hey folks, it's Jordy here for cinecom.net
and one of you guys made a request for our next Copy Cat Friday.
The intro that you saw came from Stranger Things.
It's a scene where the girl Eleven is being tested with her abilities.
She can move objects with her mind, like we've also recreated in a previous video.
But she can also crush a soda can.
For this result you'll need to shoot two times the same framing.
One is where you film without the soda can and just leave your actor with his performance.
Important is that you shoot everything from a tripod,
because the next shot has to be exactly the same.
Now, your talent walks away and you put in a soda can.
As the camera keeps rolling, I crush the can a little,
but I do my best to let it stay on the exact same position.
You could work with glue or something like that if that helps,
or just pay good attention to it like I did.
Then I walk out of the frame, let the camera capture that...
...and come back into it to crush the can a little more.
I do that several times until the can in completely crushed.
What we've actually created now is a stop-motion of that can being crushed.
Now bring these two shots into Premiere Pro
and lay the performance of your actor on track number 1.
From the source monitor I then first select a big chunk from the unharmed can
and drag that already to the second track.
This is before the can gets crushed.
Then I make a new selection from that clip in the source monitor
and lay in and out points around the first crush of the can.
I make sure to only select two frames.
Then I drag that into the timeline, also in track number 2.
Next up I select the second crush of that can,
also for two frames, and drag that as well to the timeline.
I keep doing this for all the other parts of the can being crushed.
As for the final stage, you wanna have it a little longer.
So, if everything went well you should already see the can being crushed.
And this is a technique called stop-motion.
And you can basically do it with any kind of objects.
We're going to have to solo this can on track number 2
and we'll start by selecting the first clip, where the can hasn't been crushed yet.
Heading over to the Effects Controls, I locate the Mask Pen tool under Opacity.
This allows me to draw around the can.
If there's a background like the table, you can draw this quickly.
But if there are moving objects in the background, like Yannick in the top part of the can,
you need to mask it out more precise.
So, knowing this you could make it yourself easy or a little harder.
We chose something in between.
Now, because we are working in stop-motion and only have a few frames,
it's not going to be that much work to adjust your mask.
From the first clip where we've just applied that mask on,
I select the Opacity property and copy that.
Then I select the second clip in video track number 2 and paste that property on it.
This will copy the mask over from clip 1 to clip 2.
Now it's just a simple matter of adjusting that mask a little as the can has crushed a little here as well.
Once that is done, you can do the exact same thing.
Copy the opacity property from the second clip and paste it onto the third clip.
Again, adjust your mask a little bit and continue this process.
And that's all there is to it.
However, we can fine-tune the motion of the can a little better.
We've currently chosen that each state of the crushed can is two frames long.
This will actually make it look a little bit choppy,
but we've noticed that they've done it like this too in the original series.
But we believe that is because each crush is an effort from Eleven, the character.
But what we found out to be more natural is where you have the first clips at two frames
and the final two or maybe three at only one frame.
We do this because it first takes some effort to start crushing the can
and as you're crushing it, you're into that flow and the last part of that can goes easier.
Looking at the motion, it also looks a lot more powerful.
The second thing that the Stranger Things series didn't do was adding motion blur to the can.
Each frame is just in a different state in the crush,
but in between, the can should have actually moved from one state to the other.
And that's why we're applying a simple cross dissolve transition between the two clips.
And this will smoothen out the entire motion
faking that motion blur as you can see right here.
Again, they haven't done this in the original series, but I personally find this looks...
...a bit more realistic.
As the final touch, I'm going to select everything, right-click and choose Nest.
This will group all of those layers together to which we can add some fake motion to it
to make the compositing look more realistic.
You could add a fake handheld motion to it.
We actually have eight handheld presets for Premiere Pro that you can download for free.
Or you can also animate a small scale to it, similar like they've done in the series.
However, they used a motion controlled slider.
We don't have that, so I'll just create a keyframe for the scale at 100% in the beginning
and 120% on the end of the clip.
And that's how to crush a can with your mind.
If you can take this to the next level by crushing something bigger with your mind,
then make sure to share that video with us.
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Thank you so much for watching
and stay creative!