Hi guys, and welcome to another HitFilm tutorial.
This week community giant, Mike Miller, is back to show you how to create your own Defender’s
style title sequence.
Let’s go.
The opening titles of Marvel and Netflix’s, “The Defenders,” is a pretty stylish piece
of work.
It’s also fairly easy to get a decent recreation in Hitfilm.
Taking a close look at the images in the title sequence, most of them are simple silhouettes,
or high contrast photographs of the principal actors being applied over a series of maps
of New York City, and some particle effects.
To recreate this title sequence in Hitfilm, first thing you’ll need to do is acquire
images of maps, and photographs of your principals.
It would be helpful to plan ahead, and take photographs of your actors, either on a green
or blue screen background, with some high-contrast lighting.
I didn’t do that.
I’m Mike Miller from Triem Visual, and today we’re going to look at recreating “The
Defenders” titles in Hitfilm.
Here we are in Hitfilm Express 2017.
We’re going to create a new project.
We’ll just go ahead and use the 1080p, 25fps preset, and click on “Start Compositing.”
The next thing we need to do is Import our photographs.
Next, I’m going to move to the lower left hand corner, click the “Properties” cog
for the composite shot, rename this to, “Animation Mike,” and I’m going to go ahead and change
the duration to five seconds.
Now we’ll come down to our photo of our person in our media bin, right-click, and
select “Make Composite Shot.”
Change the duration to five seconds.
This photo was not shot on a plain colored background or chroma screen, so to isolate
it from the background, we’re going to manually have to use the masking tools.
You can see as I draw the mask, I’m not necessarily trying to be 100% precise.
For example, I cut the left edge of the mask inside my own hair.
Because of the processing we’re going to do, I don’t necessarily need to capture
every last detail.
Now that I’ve got myself masked out, lets process this photo so that it will be useful
as a matte source.
We’ll come into the “Effects Panel,” and type in, “Curves,” and drag the “Color
Curves” to the layer.
Grab the “Threshold” effect and drop that below the curves.
I’m going to try to adjust the slider to get a good balance of light and shadow in
the photo.
By adding the curves effect above the threshold, I can open up the curves and further adjust
the balance of lights and darks.
You can see by adjusting the curves, I’ve even been able to lower what would normally
be the white parts of the image to a darker gray.
This allows me to bring some of the areas that were originally in highlight into shadow.
I’m mostly concerned with the highlight areas of my face.
I want the skin of my face to be well defined, but I also want to keep the shadow areas around
the eyes, the nose and the mouth.
Getting the contrast correct on the face of the subject is the most important part of
getting the look to work.
We’ll add a “Grade Layer” on top, come up to the effects list, and grab the “Blur”
effect.
Drop the blur on and set the blur’s “Radius” to 2 pixels.
This just softens up the edge a bit.
This basic technique of dropping an image into a layer, and then using curves and threshold
to reduce it to a black and white map is something that will need to be done to every single
image in the composition.
Return to the media panel and duplicate the first composite shot with your subject by
hitting “CTRL+D.” I’ll go ahead and rename this first one
to “Winter Mikey Invert.”
This is the composite shot that’s already open.
Create a new black plane, drop it underneath the image, return to the grade layer, and
add the “Invert” effect.
We’ll be using this later on, once we get to the compositing stage.
Now, we’ll be doing the same procedures to all of our individual map photos: Right-clicking
on the image in the media bin, converting to a composite shot (five seconds long), adding
curves and threshold, adjusting to taste, then adding a grade layer and an invert filter.
We’re looking for white lines on a black background.
We’ll change the sorting in the media bin from “By Folder” to “By Media,” and
from “By Name,” to “By Type.”
This groups all of my composite shots together in a single folder.
I don’t need to see the original images anymore.
From this point, I’m only going to be working with the treated composite shots.
So close out the tabs for all the other composite shots on the timeline, except for my original,
“Animation Mike” composite.
Let’s drag in the “Winter Mikey” and “Winter Mikey Invert” composites from
the media bin into the “Animation Mike” comp.
We’re going to want to parents one of these images to the other.
The order doesn’t really matter.
We just want them to stay together.
I’ll parent “Winter Mikey Invert” to “Winter Mikey,” and then we’ll change
both of these layers to a 3D compositing mode.
Open up the “Transform” properties for the parent, re-scale both the layers, and
then move them where we want to be in the frame.
I’m also going to push them back in 3D space a bit, on the Z-axis.
Next, we’ll drag in all of our map comps.
Then I’ll toggle each map comp off and on while I decide which one I want to use for
my background layer.
Once I’ve decided which map I’m going to use as my background layer, I’ll move
it to the bottom of the stack of maps and rename it, “Background Layer.”
I’ll change my background layer to a 3D compositing mode, push that pretty far back
in Z-space, and then scale it back up to fill the screen.
I’ll then rotate and re-position the background map until I like how it looks.
Now I’ll use the middle mouse button to zoom out of the viewer panel and select the
“Rectangular Mask” tool.
We’ll draw a rectangular mask over the left edge of the map, then twirl down the mask
properties, and increase the “Feather.”
Continue twirling open the mask controls until you find the control for “Path.”
Enable keyframing, and we’ll move the playhead about four seconds into the animation.
Grab the corners of this mask and drag it out to fill the entire screen.
We’ll want to add some color at this point, so come up to the effects tab, search for
the “Color Gradient,” and drag that on to the layer.
We’ll change the “Start Color,” and “End Color” of the gradient to two slightly
different shades of red.
Change the “Blend Mode” of the gradient to “Multiply,” and turn the “Opacity”
up, all the way to “100%.”
We’ll use the middle mouse wheel to zoom out and see the entire boundary of our image--shown
here by the blue box.
The two crosses we can see are the start and end points of the gradient.
I’m going to re-position them in the frame, then activate keyframing for the start and
end points.
Move to the final frame of the animation and move these points…somewhere else.
This will just give a little bit of motion to the background colors as they draw in.
Now we’ll create another black plane, and name it “Outline.”
Go up to the effects panel, type in “Set Matte,” grab the set matte effect, and drag
it onto this black plane.
The set matte effect sets the transparency for a layer using another layer as the control.
We’ll set the “Source Layer,” to the “Winter Mikey” layer, change the “Matte
Source” to “Alpha” and change the “Blend” to “Replace.”
This chokes the black plane so that it will only show where it intersects the outline
of myself.
Start taking a look at the other map layers and decide which one we want to use to fill
in my face.
Once I decide on a layer, I’m going to name it “Face Fill,” convert it to 3D, push
it back into space, and position it where I want it.
Grab the set matte effect, drop it on the face fill layer, choose Winter Mikey as the
source layer, but this time, I’m going to set the matte source to “Luminance,” and
change the blend to replace.
This will limit the map to only the highlighted, or white areas of the Winter Mikey composite
shot photo.
I’ll add and animate a mask to this one, as well, only this time I’ll use an elliptical
mask instead of a rectangular mask.
Just like with the background layer, I’m going to animate this mask to open up over
about half of the length of this shot.
Now we’ll copy and paste the gradient effect from the background map layer into the face
fill layer.
We’ll zoom out, and grab the star and end position points for the gradient and move
them to new locations, skip to the end of the shot, and move these start and end points
somewhere else, again.
Next I’m going to perform the same series of steps, using another one of my map composites
as the fill.
However, when I toggle it on, I can see that the topmost map is covering up all the animations
below.
This is the point at which I’m going to take all of my map layers, and change the
“Blending Mode” of each one to “Add,” then repeating the same series of steps with
my other map layers: Convert to 3D, push back in 3D space, add
the set matte effect, select Winter Mikey as the source layer, experiment with blend
modes, and then (once I’m happy with the placement) adding and animating a mask to
kind of “wipe” the map in.
For one of these layers I drew an irregular mask with the “Freehand Mask” tool and
animated the “Expansion” property instead.
Again, I copied and pasted the same gradient effect that I’ve been using, and adjusted
the start and end points.
At this point I went back over my layers and just changed and refined a few things:
I adjusted some of the mask animations and I dropped the opacity of the background map
layer from 100% to something around 40% or 50%.
because the background map was overpowering.
And, finally, I have a still frame that has the look that I want.
Next, we’ll move the playhead to about four seconds Into the animation, open up the camera
controls and activate keyframing for the position property.
I’ll move the playhead back about a second, and then move the camera to a new position.
I’ll move the camera to a new position.
I’ll move the camera back in Z-space, over to the left and up a little bit, so that the
camera starts closer into the layers, with my face centered more in the frame.
Then I’ll take this first camera keyframe move it to the first frame of the composite
shot, select both the keyframes, and change the interpolation type from “Linear,”
to “Smooth.”
It’s time to grade!
We’ll create a grade layer, name it ‘Tint” and put the tint effect on it.
We’ll change the colors in the tint effect so that white is being mapped to a slightly-orangish
red, and we’ll change the tint amount to about 75%.
This will clean up those last, lingering bits of gray where the set matte and the masks
are interacting.
I’ll create another grade layer and name it, “Glitch Glow.”
On the glitch glow layer, I’m going to add a “Zoom Blur” effect.
Then, I’ll take the blur strength up to 100% and activate keyframing.
I’ll move forward a few frames, change the strength from 100% to -100%, step forward
another few frames, take the strength back to 100%, step forward a few more frame, and
change the strength to 0%.
Then, set the blend mode of this layer to add.
I’ll create another grade layer, and call it “Glow” and add the glow effect.
I’ll turn the glow “Intensity” all the way up to 5, then I’ll play with the “Threshold”
and “Radius” sliders until I get the glow positioned where I want it.
Then I’ll turn the intensity back down to something lower, like, about 1.4
I’ll duplicate this glow, and on the top glow, I’ll bring the radius back in to something
a lot narrower, like, maybe about 5, and turn the intensity of the glow down to about 0.5.
I’ll created another grade layer and name this “Shake,” and drag the “Camera Shake”
effect to the shake grade layer.
I’ll turn the shake “speed” down from 1/5 to about 0.12.
I’ll change the seed to a random value and I’ll turn the “smoothness” up a bit.I’ll
turn the “Amount” down to something lower as well--maybe 5 to 15.
Next we’ll create yet another grade layer and call it “Letterbox.”
Drag the “Letterbox” effect to the letterbox grade layer.
After dragging the letterbox grade onto the letterbox grade layer, I didn’t like how
my face was positioned in the frame, so I went back and adjusted my camera keyframes
so that the camera was higher on the “Y” axis.
To create something similar to the floating particles in Hitfilm Express, I dragged in
my black plane from the media bin.
I added the “Fractal Noise” effect and I selected the “Starfield” preset.
Users of versions of Hitfilm earlier than 2017 will not have this starfield preset--you’ll
have to adjust the fractal noise yourself.
With the starfield preset, I changed the colors from black and white to black and an orange.
I set the blend mode for this layer to add.
I made several duplicates of the fractal noise layer, and spread them out in z-space, and
changed the seed on each layer, then keyframe their position properties so each of them
were moving up on the y-axis a little bit over the course of the animation.
And that pretty much covers how to make “Defenders” style titles in Hitfilm Express.
The version on-screen now was taken into Hitfilm Pro for a little bit more work.
Anamorphic Light Flares were added--an effect that’s available to Express users if you
purchase the “Atmospheric Lighting” add-on--but the three layers of fractal noise were replaced
with a full particle simulator.
I’d like to thank everybody for sitting through this tutorial!
I hope you found it useful, and that you can adapt these techniques to create your own
“Defenders” style titles.
I’m Mike Miller for Triem Visual, and I’ll see you next time.
Thanks Mike for that awesome tutorial, everyone else do remember to subscribe and click the
little bell to make sure you’re notified of all the cool content we’ve got coming
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Bye!