This video is brought to you by Storyblocks Audio.
The Bounty Hunter failed.
Fetch me the Jedi.
Your apprentice failed.
You'll fail, Jedi.
Damn, guys.
This was insane.
It was my biggest project ever and, I must say, I've [censored] loved it.
I enjoyed every last bit of it and believe me this mini short story will definitely have a sequel.
But because it was a bigger project, we thought to ourselves, 'We need help.'
And, luckily, we had fellow YouTuber Ignace Aleya come to our aid,
ready to help us with his 3D and visual effects expertise.
I would highly recommend this channel to all filmmakers interested in visual effects.
He does a wide variety of in-depth tutorials
and he even did a video about the 3D ship in this Star Wars short movie.
He explains his workflow and how to composite 3D objects.
So go check that out.
I'll leave a link for that in the description below.
However, Ignace wasn't the only help we had.
We also had the Red Giant plugin for After Effects which made VFX life much easier for us
For instance, this Force blast which we made with a Red Giant tutorial and their plugins.
Red giant is a tool I would absolutely recommend.
Again, I'll link it in the description below.
Now, guys, I already saw the last Star Wars movie.
Believe it or not, but my pal JJ Abrams and I did a quick screening
because he wanted to know my thoughts about it.
And I must say..
No. No, I'm just kidding about JJ Abrams.
I did see the movie, though, 2 days ago.
Here in Belgium the premiere was on the 18th,
and as a huge fan, I couldn't not go.
That's why Gilles and me went to that premiere.
And guess what?
It was a marathon of the last three Star Wars movies.
It was awesome, just awesome.
And do you want to know who died?
Well it-
Sorry, I would never spoil a movie.
No, that's something I really, really hate.
But I think it's time now to start with the effect.
And the effect that we are recreating today is the iconic Force Choke of the Sith Lords.
For this effect, you'll need two shots: a camera movement, and of course, an empty shot on a tripod.
This tripod shot can be quite simple.
Just film your Sith Lord over shoulder.
In the shot, you can let them lift up his hand pretending to choke somebody.
Then, the second shot will be the green screen shot.
But we are going to use a camera movement for this.
Let your actors stand in front and on the green screen while he pretends to be suffocating.
Then aim your camera towards him while holding it high in the air.
Overtime, lower the camera but keep the framing on your actor.
This lowering camera movement will add the perspective change on your actor
and will help with selling the effect.
You can perfectly do this handheld as we will stabilize it afterwards.
However, do try to keep it as steady as possible.
Okay, now that we have our shots, let's begin with the post-production.
Of course, we are doing this effect in After Effects because it will need some clever stabilizing tricks.
So, in After Effects, place your empty shot into a new composition
and the green screen shot on top of that.
Then select your green screen shot and look for the 'Warp Stabilizer' inside the Tracker panel.
Click on that and let After Effects do its thing.
Once it's done, go to the Effects control panel
and open up the advanced option of the Warp Stabilizer effect.
Here, you can enable the 'Show Track Points' option which will show you the track points of the effect.
Obviously.
What we now want to do is select all the track points around our actor and delete them.
Do this for the entire length of the clip.
This means go 20 frames further in time, select the track points, and delete.
Repeat and delete.
Just don't delete any points that sit on the actor.
When you are done, you can disable the 'Show Track Points' option and change two settings in the effects.
The first one is 'Results' which you can set to 'No Motion.'
The second setting is the 'Method' which needs to be on 'Position, Scale and Rotation.'
Okay.
Now we will already have a green screen clip that is stabilized on the actor.
The next step is to key out the green.
So look for the 'Keylight' effect and drag that to your green screen shot,
and, you know the drill.
Use a color picker to select green, fine tune with the Clip Black and White,
and maybe even use the 'Shrink' and 'Softness' option to remove the edge.
If you still have some grain in your shot,
you can always adjust the 'Replace Method' to 'Hard Color.'
This will sometimes help with removing the grain and, like with all green keying,
let's create a mask to cut away the rest of the clip.
Due to the camera movement and the perspective change,
your mask will probably go wrong throughout the clip.
That's why we need to animate the mask so that it follows along with your actor.
The next step is to position and scale your actor so that he stands on the right spot.
Then enable the animation for the position of the actor and let them move up in the air.
Try to match the movement of the Sith Lords arm so that it looks like he is lifting him up with the Force.
Of course use 'Ease Out' on the first keyframe and 'Ease In' on the last.
When you have done this, let's fine tune the motion a little bit more.
Select the position property and go in the Graph Editor.
Here, you can now determine the speed of the Ease Out and Ease In.
I want to make the movement in the beginning faster so drag the lever closer to the keyframe.
Now I do the opposite for the last keyframe and drag the lever further away,
making the movement slower towards the ends.
This will now already leave you with your actor being left up in the air by the Force.
However, we can still add some more details to the effect.
But first let's check on Jordy.
He had something really cool in store for us.
Hi there, it's me Jordy.
I mean droids, Star Wars droid, that's right.
And you know what? Where I got these very cool robot sound effects from?
That's right, from Storyblocks Audio, our sponsor today.
Storyblocks Audio is an incredible library packed with sound effects, music and loops.
For almost every project, we do our sound design using Audioblocks
like we also did with the intro film of this tutorial.
And besides the sound effects, you can also search for music.
There are various genres that you can use in versatile, but also in commercial projects.
And finally our loops which can help you to create your own music score.
How cool is that?
As you know, it's even cooler than that, guys.
There's only a single price per year or per month, which allows you to download the entire library if you like so.
So make sure to click that first link in the description down below to start downloading right away.
Whoops!
Back to you, Yannick.
What?
What? I don't know what I just saw.
How did he become a droid?
And a bad droid.
Anyways, let's find out after the rest of the effect.
And let's start with the first detail which is a small motion on the empty background.
First scale the clip up with 10%, then with the position, let the clip move down.
This small movement will enhance the force lift and will help sell the effect.
Another thing missing to make the effect more realistic is the shadow.
For this, you can duplicate the empty layer and place it between the two shots we already have.
Then, in the Effect library, look for the Lumetri effect and drag that to the duplicates.
Now, in the effects control panel, you can make the clip more blue-ish
and decrease the exposure but only a little bit.
Then adjust the blending mode of the duplicate clip and set it to 'Multiply.'
Draw a mask where you want a shadow to be and feather to your liking.
You can look at the shadows of other objects in your shot to match your fake one.
Then, when the actor moves up in the sky, animate the mask and then feather along.
Increase the feather a bunch and make the mask bigger and farther removed from the actor.
Now, the last detail is not necessary, but can make it more fun.
Now if you want, you can always add dust around your actor to really show off the power of the Force.
We just used stock clips we found on Storyblocks but you can use whatever.
And this will leave you with a very cool Star Wars effect.
You're probably thinking, 'Jordy, what are you doing?'
Well, I am motion capturing my motion.
That's right.
This right here is an Xsens suit which was sent to us.
Unfortunately, it's a loaned suit so we're gonna have to send it back.
Or not.
And so what basically does is capture my motion into the 3D program of Xsens itself.
You can see here and to the smallest details.
It is capturing everything.
And what's cool about it is, well, is that it is completely wireless so I can just start running around
and the program will stay capturing my motion wherever I go.
How cool is that?
So the suit has a bunch of sensors in it and, you know, that's basically it.
It actually works super simple.
Capturing the motion went super easy but then comes the hard part.
You need to link your motion capture thing into a 3D program.
It works with everything, like, with cinema 4D, 3DS Max, Maya, whatever that you like.
But, you know, you need to know something about that program.
So we had a little bit of trouble there because we didn't have much time to figure it all out.
Mostly Yannick assigned me there but that is the 3D side of things.
You need to know something about shading, about textures, how to model, maybe,
how to link your motion capture thing to a specific model that you have, you know.
That's a different story.
Maybe in a couple of months or so when we get to practice more in that program,
we can do it a little bit better.
But until now, I mean, the motion looks good, right?
So a big thanks to Xsens for letting us borrow.
This suit was a really awesome experience for us.
If you like to check out more about the suit as well
you could find a link somewhere in the description down below.
And now, Yannick, back to you.
Well, Jordy, that is a coincidence.
I also wanted to talk about motion capture in my Yannick's Fun Fact Fountain.
Everybody knows that, in the early Star Wars movies, they mostly used practical effects.
Even the droids back then were humans in suits but, lately,
they are using aliens that just cannot be recreated by practical effects
such as Dobbu Scay from the Last Jedi.
This was a very small drunken alien who can be seen inserting coins in bb-8,
but the fun fact about this Is that the alien is played by Mark Hamill himself..
Yeah, you heard me, Luke Skywalker is also a very small drunken gambler Alien.
Nice to know.
But, like you can guess, it's almost impossible to stick a human in such a small alien suit.
We can try, of course.
However, I don't think Mark Hamill will like you afterwards.
And that was it for today, guys.
I hope you enjoyed the Star Wars video as much as I did.
Thank you so much for watching.
Thank you Storyblocks Audio for the support and, as always,
keep sending us your CopyCat ideas in the comments below.
And, oh yeah, stay creative.
Thank you Jordy for this lovely 3D experience.
Now I hate shaders, lighting, and animations,
but I hate even more is rendering.
Its rendering for four hours.
Four.
It's like half-past three now.
Dammit, Jordy.