this video was sponsored by action vfx hey what's up ladies and gentlemen
in today's video we're going to see how to create this starfield effect from moon knight
you may have seen this effect pop up on social media already but it's pretty cool and i wanted
to recreate this using adobe after effects if you want i will provide you with all the files
necessary in order to achieve this effect using the link in the description below you
can download all of these and without further ado let's open up adobe after effects and get started
alright so here we have our footage and then i found this star skyfield which is from nasa's
website i will link that in the description so you can follow along with the same one as well
and then i have this 3d rendered out sahara just so i had this same kind of vibe as the moon knight
so the first thing that i want to do is bring my moon knight footage into a new composition
and right here i want to take a quick look at what area i'm covering so then i'm going over
to the pen tool and just make a rough mask around myself once i have that i'm going
to press f on the keyboard feather it just a little bit and then i'm going over to effects
keying and add a key light i'm just going to pick the green color and go into the screen
mat so i can see the black and white and then go into the screen mat right here set it to 15
85 something like that should work fine and once you're satisfied you can set it to intermediate
result then i'm going to add a advanced spill suppressor as well on top of that
so it gets rid of all the green spill and we have our key so that's great awesome all right before
we continue with this video let me talk about today's video sponsor action vfx they offer
high quality pre-recorded stock footage for visual effects artists and currently they're doing a 50
off discount so definitely go with the link in the description below and check out their amazing deal
because right now is your chance to pick up some really awesome elements for your vfx for example
in this sahara shot if you want to sell this effect a little bit more you can see that i have
recorded myself using a leaf blower but we don't have any sand being blown around by the wind of
the saryan desert so if you want to fake that and bring a little bit more life to your scene
you can use action vfx elements to fake that they have for example their dust waves or atmospheric
fogs but you can also import them in adobe after effects on your desert footage and then you can
change the tint mode to a more orange vibe so now it's going to look like it's sand dancing around
instead of just smoke or anything else alright links are in the description and without further
ado let's jump back to the tutorial once we have our key we can go back to the project and we can
now add our sky map our star field also to its own new composition and right here we have the
final sky so now i want to drag this composition into my original footage or the first composition
that we've created right here and so now we can see that we have our scarf and sky field
all i want to do is look at the center of my sky field and as you can see it's pretty big because
we're working in a full hd composition but the sky field is 8k so we're going to just drag it
lower than the horizon so let's say here is the horizon let's say the midpoint of the earth would
be here or even lower that's completely up to you but just put it lower than the horizon
and then i'm going to bring in the sahara in between so we have some ground to stand on
and we have myself which i'm going to press s on the keyboard and actually before we do that i'm
going over to the pan behind tool i'm going to bring on the center point right here in between
my feet so i can press s on the keyboard and scale myself according to the scene so that's
this looks pretty cool so if you want some shadow here you can always add the shadow effect from
red giant it's the easiest way to do this but you also have other techniques if you'd like to but
this way you can create some fake um shadow on the floor so that's looking pretty cool um by the way
if we don't like this we're going to cut this and then go to layer recompose move all the attributes
heat character and right here we're going to apply that same shadow effect again and now it
should work wonders and then we can also play with the opacity and stuff like that right here
make it pretty soft and also add a little bit of softness to the shadow
there we go obviously we're going to do um some color grading anyway so we see the star
field right behind it and now we click on the star field we can check right here maybe make
it a little bit smaller just so we have a little bit more detail in the stars but basically this
is going to be it and so we want to start at the moment when i bring up the hands like right here
and then press r on the keyboard for this for the star field click on the stopwatch and go all the
way till the end and actually the star field is not long enough so i'm going to jump back into
that composition right click composition settings and change it to something like 15 seconds and now
make it longer go back to the main comp and extend that composition as well so right here at the
end i wanna rotate it counterclockwise something like let's go negative uh let's go negative five
and also make sure that we do scale it up a little bit more right here just so we cover these corners
and so once you're satisfied with this let's take a look you can always press uh u on the
keyboard as well and then right click here and then go to keyframe assistance and easy ease out
and that way it's going to start slowly and it's starting to rotate the background so now
for the cool part to make this work is to duplicate the background or the star field
and then i'm going to solo this for now and all i'm going to do is go all the way till the end
press u on the keyboard and click on this rotation so both of the keyframes are highlighted make sure
you're standing on one of these keyframes and now if you offset this it's going to have different
looking results but it's going to have the same speed so um maybe we want to also affect the speed
a little bit by playing around here with -4 maybe so it's going a little bit slower because these
are closer to the camera and they're going to have more perspective and we can also add a curves here
to add a little bit more contrast we have more just of the fewer particles or or fewer sky um
well stars and then if you change a blending mode to a screen you're going to start seeing
a little bit more especially if you can solo this we're going to start seeing a perspective change
in these stars and that's exactly what's happening in the series as well some of them go faster some
of them go slower so maybe we want to bring this to even minus three at the end and so you get a
lot of perspective change you can duplicate this even once more press r on the keyboard
and go to one of these keyframes and then click on the rotation play around with the differences here
and maybe this time we want to go for minus seven
and like that you're going to start uh creating some yeah very specific uh depth in your star
field like right here you can definitely see that some of them go faster than the other ones
and so the more you're going to do that the more variation you're going to get the most important
is that your top layers are in a blending mode of screen with a lot of contrast and the bottom
layer stays at normal with the contrast that you want in the final result to be so
now we have something like this and if you want you can select these first
keyframes go into the graph editor and even extend this more so it starts even slower
so now if you want those strokes that you also see in the series we can also do that using a
ellipse tool and for the fill i'm going to set it to none and then for the color i'm going
to set it to white and for the stroke maybe something like 20 pixels that should be all
right now we can create this kind of circle and if you want you can now press s on the keyboard
click on the scale and then go like one second or like half a second let's say
and just scale it up quite a bit and then go back to one second and use the same keyframe
so now what you can do is hold alt and click on the stopwatch for scale and then go in here and
click the arrow property and then loop out which is just going to loop our animation over and
over and over again so now it's going to scale up scale down skill up scale down scale up scale down
that's perfect so what we can do with this uh and actually you can go to the first keyframe
and scale it even well done further what we can do with this is add an echo effect
so we are going to add the echo effect set the copies to six and now we get something like this
and especially by solo this we can see what is going on
so i'm not digging this because it doesn't come back to its original state so i'm just going to
copy the first keyframe and paste that one here so now it's going to have this type of animation
so that's looking pretty cool um i'm also going to play here with dk so we have a little bit of
a fade out and if you want you can also add a fast box blur to blur it just a little bit
like that and if you play with blending modes like additive
and put that also in the background you're going to start getting that line that they
also use in the series obviously you can make it bigger smaller whatever floats your boat
and then also i just moved it over to one side because we only have one side to show
obviously here what they've also done is add a fill uh which is going to be a little bit bluish
and then a perfect low which is going to add the glow to the edges here
so yeah play around with these settings and this is how you should get something like that
so i'm going to turn this off for now and just concentrate on the star star field so i'm going
to toggle the switches and make sure that i turn on motion blur that's going to sell the effect
we can immediately see that now it's starting to warp all these particles and they look great
and if you want more motion blur you have two options either you make your animation faster
by going to the end and just increasing the runs i take or go to the composition settings go into
advanced and set the shutter angle here to 360. that's going to add a lot more motion blur into
your shot for the sahara i'm also going to press s on the keyboard and just scale it up a little bit
and place it somewhere here and i'm also going to add some curves to it to make it a little
bit darker or actually i do like the darkness maybe i want to make it brighter to fit myself
a little bit more and add also a tint to it set it to 35 something like that that's looking alright
okay so i'm digging this look here and now i'm going to add an adjustment layer on top of it all
i'm going to add a curves here and for this curves i'm going to just make it darker so in
this case i am going to make it darker because i want to get that kind of dark midnight look
it's a little bit similar to the video where we're doing day to night conversion uh so yeah
use that video as well to get some extra details if you're not familiar with doing this technique
you can also add an adjustment layer just on top of these star fields so you can increase
the brightness over there see what works what does and play around a little bit with all these things
and if you want more detail in your star field you can always jump into this composition and
add detail from other star fields in here for example this is another star field that i found
i'm just going to mascot this part and press f on the keyboard
and then scale or change the blending mode to screen add some curves to it
and maybe rotate it into position scale it down a little bit but like this you get some even
more variation in there and you're going to get it into your final shot right here
all right so now we have the moon i'm going to drag this into my composition somewhere behind
the sahara as well and just go to my final state where i want everything to stop make sure that the
rotation maybe stops a little bit earlier and also right click keyframe assistance and easy ease in
now go back to the graph editor make sure that this comes to a smooth stop here you can even
trim it a little bit more that's going to be up to you and then come to this point where i'm going to
take the moon and lace it into my shot however i want so let's say you want to have a big moon
coming here into the center of your shop so all we have to do now is parent this to the star field
one of them and now it should rotate with that so we are going to extend it a little bit and so
now it's rotating and once it gets clipped off we can just trim our layer because it's not visible
and so now it's just going to come to a smooth stop with the moon being in the final shot here
all right so that's it on how to create the star field effect
from the moon knight and here you have the final result enjoy
alright i hope you enjoyed that if you did give this video a like also be sure to subscribe to
the channel for more and hit the notification bell to stay notified when i upload new videos
apart from that i'm going to leave you with another upload of mine right here
and i'll see you in the next one until then create epic videos