This video is brought to you by Storyblocks
[Upbeat music]
-No, Jordy.
-Hey Yannick, catch!
-Damn it, Jordy!
-Yannick, catch!
-No, Jordy!
-And Yannick!
[Cinecom's intro music]
Hey folks, Jordy here for cinecom.net
and welcome to the last Copy Cat Friday... of 2018!
In this weekly series we recreate simple visual effects
from famous films and music videos.
Today we are having a look at ‘Mr. Right’,
a film with Sam Rockwell and Anna Kendrick
and there's a scene where Sam, aka Frances,
throws a bunch of knives to Anna, aka Martha.
And guess what? She caught all of them!
And Yannick did not, by the way.
-Damn it, Jordy!
Sorry, Yannick.
In the meantime we are gonna have a look at 5 different techniques
on how you can throw a knife or any other object and let your target catch it.
And before we begin though, I'd like to thank Storyblocks for their support today.
As a video editor you constantly need various video assets
to complete your film projects.
A simple stock clip or visual effect template can cost a lot of money over time.
With Storyblocks you only need to pay a single price per-year,
which allows you to download unlimited items from their growing library.
From transitions to overlays, After Effects templates and high quality 4K stock clips.
Storyblocks offers everything that you need in one place.
To check it out yourself, make sure to click the first link in the description below.
Now, let's start off with the most easy one.
You wanna film your subject throwing a knife.
As he or she throws, you want to make
a quick pan in the direction that the knife goes.
Make sure that you do this safe and obviously, nobody stands in the way.
We put up some planks to where I threw the knife,
so that we also wouldn't break anything.
Then comes your second shot.
Yannick is already holding a knife in his hands.
We’re going to have to start the shot by quickly swiping the camera in,
and as we do so, Yannick will just lift up the knife and make it seem like he caught it.
Placing these two shots next to each other
already gives you the ‘catching a knife’ results.
Most of the shots from the scene that we saw in ‘Mr. Right’
were actually done this way.
But there are 4 other techniques if you’d like to make some variations in your shots.
The second one is where you see both of your actors in the same shot.
Here it's important that you film from a tripod.
I'm starting with throwing the knife, again, I trow against the planks.
Pay attention though, that you throw at the right height,
where your victim is sure to catch the knife.
The camera stays rolling and now Yannick is going to stand before those planks.
He’s already holding that knife just like before.
At a moment he will then pretend like he caught the knife.
There’s a little bit of more work than just placing the two shots together,
so we're going to have to jump into Premiere Pro.
Place the shot of you throwing the knife on the bottom of the timeline.
On top of there goes your victim.
With the top one selected, head over to the Effects Controls,
Opacity, and from there click on the Pen tool.
With this, you can draw a mask around the victim.
You can do this pretty rough, though.
Once you're done, it will reveal the clip below.
From your Mask Path options you want to enable the animation.
Right before the knife comes closer, you want to change the shape of the mask
to make sure that the knife stays visible.
Once Yannick has caught the knife, you can enlarge the mask again
to make the actual flying knife disappear.
Now, since all of this was shot on a tripod, you could add a fake handheld motion to it.
And these are free presets from us,
which I’ll leave a link to in the description.
[Music]
The next technique is another super-easy one.
Basically, you're gonna reverse your movement.
So, what you're essentially doing is throwing a knife,
but reversed it looks like you're catching it.
Of course, you don't want your audience to notice that you've reversed that shot.
So, here are a few pointers.
For starters, play the action as if you would catch the knife
and pay attention to what you do, which movements do you make.
What we found out was that your arm comes up more from below,
which is a lot different than if you would actually throw a knife.
Also, your face expression should be reversed.
We actually had to shoot it a couple of times to get it right.
When playing back in reverse you come up with new insights.
As for in Premiere Pro, reversing a clip is super easy.
Simply right-click on your clip, choose Speed, Duration
and check the ‘Reverse Speed’ box, that’s it!
This brings us to the 4th knife throwing technique,
which is, together with the last one, the most challenging.
In Mr. Right, the film, you can see a knife flying in slow motion
as eventually Martha catches it.
Basically, here's how it goes.
You film your subject pretending to catch a knife,
just like we've done before.
Next, you hold a knife in a clear vision and take a shot of it as well.
Important is that all of these shots are made perfectly from the side.
This means that we don't see any perspective in the knife.
In Premiere Pro you place your actor on track 1 and the shot of the knife on track 2.
Select the upper track, head over to the Opacity,
take the Pen tool and draw a precise mask around the knife.
When you're done, right-click on that clip and choose Frame Hold
to freeze that frame and make it function as a still image.
Then again, right-click on that same clip and now choose Nest.
And this will group that clip into a new sequence,
which we have to do because of a conflict in Premiere Pro that will occur later on.
Then apply the Transform effect to the nested sequence.
With this we can animate the rotation
and the position to make the knife fly through the air.
But before we can do that, we first have to set the anchor points.
Select the Transform effect,
which allows you to place the crosshair to be in the middle of the knife.
There are two of these crosshairs which both need to sit in there.
And it can be a little hassle to get them where you want
but, hey, welcome to Premiere.
Once that sits in place, you can now go ahead
and enable the Animation for the position and the rotation.
Start with the knife off-screen, then go further in time and pull it forward.
And of course also do that for the rotation, let's just rotate it a couple of times.
Try to align the rotation of the knife on the end
with the actual knife that Yannick is holding.
Here you also want to cut the fake knife away.
When you're done, make sure to disable to use ‘Composition’s shutter angle’
and set one of your own.
180 is a natural motion blur.
If your knife would move too slow, you're gonna see that it's fake.
And that is mostly because of the lighting.
So, this technique only works if you want your knife to move fast.
But you can of course make it go a lot slower
than if you would actually throw it.
And this brings me to the last and final technique to catch a knife
which is gonna be the same as the previous one,
but under a perspective.
Ideally, you want to create a 3-dimensional knife.
But we want to keep it simple here today,
so we found a trick that can be done completely inside Premiere Pro.
First, here's how to shoot it.
Take a shot of your talent from an angle.
You can have your focus set to the back and then pull forward to the actor.
And that way it seems like you're focus pulling from the knife towards your actor.
It’s gonna be easier to film this from a tripod.
Like before, suddenly the actor will catch a knife that he already had in his hands.
And then we're going to need a shot of a rotating knife.
And the reason that we can’t do this in Premiere
is because the perspective needs to stay the same as the knife turns around.
So, we came up with a setup that allows us to rotate the knife for real.
This right here is a simple pole glued to a knife.
To have a consistent rotation we used a drill.
Behind the knife there sits a green screen.
You can also use a green t-shirt or any other even color plate.
The pole itself will also be wrapped in a green paper
as we need to remove this later on too.
Then take the shot and jump into Premiere Pro.
Your normal shot goes on the bottom of the timeline
and the rotating knife on top.
Then go to Effects Controls and search for the Ultra Key.
Apply this to the rotating knife
and choose the color picker to remove the green.
Next up, we're gonna go to Opacity from this clip
and click on the Pen tool to draw a mask around the knife.
Make sure anything from the surrounding is gone.
Finally, we're going to have to animate the knife.
It's already rotating, so that is good.
Select the Motion property and move the anchor point to the middle of the knife.
Now we can enable Animation for the position and the scale.
Over time you want to scale the knife down and move it to the right.
It takes a couple of readjustments to make it look natural.
When the knife goes further into the distance it has to move slower.
What helps is to right-click on the last keyframe and choose Ease Out.
[Music]
And that's how you can throw knives at someone, safely.
Thank you so much for watching, enjoy your New Year's Eve.
Make sure to party hard, but remember:
If you have any dangerous stunts in mind, just use Premiere.
Stay Creative!
-So yeah, I got angry at the knife and I broke it.
Because the knife attacked my floor.