Hey guys Yannick here for Cinecom.net
and welcome back to Copycat Friday.
The series where we recreate effects from
almost everything.
And this week we are going to recreate some A$ap Rocky magic.
In one of his older music videos called "Praise the Lord"
you can see buildings bouncing around like they were happy skippy balls.
But there are of course multiple artists who have done this effect.
Like for example Jane or Cash Bunny
and this is exactly what we are recreating today in After Effects.
By the way, guys, we will explain this effect in a super simple way
but also in a more advanced method.
So for a full learning experience stick by me until the end.
Now commence the learning
The first thing we are going to need is footage of buildings.
And of course you can choose random buildings in your city.
But the cities where we live are small and tall buildings are quite scarce.
That's why we asked some help from our best friend and sponsor Storyblocks Video.
They have a ton of city skyline assets ready for us to use.
We just have to pick the one we want.
And another reason why we love Storyblocks Video is because of their aerial shots.
Due to the ban of flying drones in our country
it's quite impossible to make beautiful aerial shots.
But Storyblocks Video has a ton of aerial shots and not only of cities.
So you can say that Storyblocks Video is the perfect filmmaker buddy.
And they give you an unlimited amount of love and friendship for only one single prize per year.
So, what are you waiting for and go to the first link in the description below and find yourself a friend for life.
Okay, we have everything we need let's lift off After Effects.
And first we of course are going to start with the easy method.
For this, we need some fixed footage of dull buildings.
Place the footage in your timeline
and the first thing you can do is duplicate the footage for every building you want to animate.
So for us this will be two times.
Then of course give them names to make it easier
and disable every building layer except for one.
On this building layer we are going to create a detailed mask around the building
which leaves us with only the building.
Now the next thing is going to be the removal of the building from the original clip.
And the method for this really depends on your footage.
Like you can see with our footage we have a sky as a background.
So the removal will be quite easy.
We can simply duplicate the original clip and mask out a big part of the sky
and place it over our building to remove it.
Another method is using the Clone Stamp Tool.
This method is more advanced and can be used if your background is more complicated.
With the Clone Stamp Tool you can select parts of your clip and clone them to a new location.
This way you can remove any part of your original clip.
But of course this will take some time and the effect tends to get heavy after too much brush strokes.
Okay, we removed our building but we still have our building on a separate layer
so now we can do whatever we want with the building.
Really?
Yes, we can add whatever effect we want
and let's start with a simple stretch effect.
For this we are going to use the Puppet Pin Tool.
You can create a couple of pins on the edge of the building then we just need to animate them.
So go further in time,
take the top puppet pins and drag them higher.
Now again go further in time and place the puppet pins back in the original position.
And now you already have a building that stretches out and back.
However, we can also do the opposite with a different building making it squish down.
So enable another building layer and mask out a different building.
Now again, use the puppet pin tool like before but this time animate the puppet pins to go down and not up.
And for this new building we are adding something extra.
The Bulge Effect.
Set the bulge center to the lower part of the building we are squishing and increase both the radiuses.
Then animate the bilge height from 0 to 1 and back to 0 in the same time span as your squishing animation.
And this will already leave you with a super simple, but cool dancing building animation.
♪
And now it's time to take it to the next level.
We are going to use a moving aerial shot which will make it a little bit harder.
Again place your shot in After Effects.
And the first thing we are going to do is single out the giant tower.
In the effects library look for Mocha and drag that to your footage.
In the effects control panel you can now click on the mocha logo, which will open up a new window.
With the Spline Tool you can now create a detailed spline around your tower.
Then enable the perspective tracking option and let the tracking commence.
Of course adjust the spline when needed.
And once the tracking is done just save mocha and close the window.
Now go to the effects control panel again
and here you can open up the matte option and choose create after effects masks.
Boom!
You have a masked out tower.
Next up, we will duplicate our clip and select the lower clip.
Here, we are going to invert the mask, so we have our background back.
And with this lower clip we are going to create an empty shot without the tower.
And this we will do with the Content Aware Fill.
First increase the expansion of the mask from the background,
then open up the Content Aware Fill window and here we can set the fill mode to object
and arrange to entire duration.
Now if you want you can create a reference frame in Photoshop.
This is actually an empty shot of your city without the tower that After Effects can use
to calculate the filling effect.
Personally, I recommend that you create such a reference frame, but I can't force you.
DO IT!
Then we are ready to generate the fill layer.
Let After Effects do its thing which probably will take a while, and look at that...
We still have the same footage as before...
But we can now remove the tower and of course we can throw some effects on it.
Just like the CC Bend it effect.
Place the start of the effect on the bottom of the tower and your end on top.
Then with the bent option you can swing the tower around like it's made from rubber.
now add an extra force motion blur to it
and badabim-badaboom
You have yourself a cool effect.
And of course with this principle, you can go crazy and create whatever you want.
Whatever...
♪
Time for a
Yannicks
Fun
Fact
FOOOOOUUUNTAAAAAAAIIINNN!
And of course this fun fact is going to be about buildings or better about creating buildings.
Everybody knows The Sims
and everybody also knows that building the house is the most fun thing to do in The Sims.
But
did you know that The Sims was originally created to be an architect simulator?
Well...
I didn't but it explains why building is so much fun and so good in the game.
And that was it for today guys!
Thank you so much for watching.
Thank you Storyblocks video for the support
and like always
Stay creative!
You can now click on the Mocha loco ...
loco ...
You can click on the moka loko...
I'll translate that: "I'm sweating like a big belly pony".