[Music]
It's Copy Cat Friday!
What's up guys, Jordy here for cinecom.net
and last week we were pretty excited to see another amazingly executed music video
from Taylor Swift.
There's a lot from the music video clip that we can recreate and show you guys how it was done,
but I believe what stood out the most were the glitch effects and the Sci-Fi radar in Taylor's eye.
Let’s start with that last one.
After we analyzed the music video, ready for it,
we setup all the lights and took several shots of Ellen.
Ellen is actually helping us a little as a student worker,
so now and then she's also our model.
The shoot itself was nothing more than just an extreme close up of her eye,
her mouth, a close of her face, a breast shot and a medium shot.
After everything was shot, we brought it into After Effects.
And for that Sci-Fi thing in her eyes, we first had to motion-track her eyes.
If you can't locate the Motion Tracker, head to the Menu, choose Window
and then Tracker.
Make sure that you have your clip in the composition selected
and then you can click on Track Motion.
Now, this will give you a tracking point, which you can enlarge and move around.
The idea is to move this point to your talent's eyes.
Now, tracking doesn't always go as we want to.
There're two things that you need to pay attention to.
First up is contrast and the other thing are moving objects.
The After Effects tracker needs contrast.
You can't track a piece of blue tape on a blue wall.
So what we did was place a light in front of Ellen and made sure it was visible in her eyes.
That way we had a good contrast point.
And the second thing is motion.
You don't want anything to walk in front of the point that you want to track.
In this case we asked Ellen not to blink while recording.
If her eye lids would close, it would cover the tracking point.
In this case the light in her dark eyes.
So, back to After Effects.
Place the inside rectangle over the light point in her eye
and enlarge the outer square...
...a little, to mark the area that After Effects has to use to calculate the motion.
Once that's in place, just hit the Play button from the tracker window.
If everything went well, the tracker should do its job.
If the tracker went crazy, hit the Reset button and make your tracking point larger.
When the tracking is complete, we're going to assign this data to a new layer.
Go to the menu on top, select Layer, New, and choose Null object.
It will appear in your composition.
And from the tracker window, we can now click on Edit Target
and choose that null object from the dropdown menu.
If you're working with multiple tracking points it's suggested to rename your null object layers.
And then just hit Apply and OK in the popup box that appears.
And that null object will now move with Ellen's eyes
and we can use that Null object to link other objects too.
Now we've chosen two radar elements from the pack,
which you can simply drag and drop into your composition.
Position and scale them so that they match within your talent's eyes.
Then it's just a simple matter of taking the whip tool from your composition's layers,
and dragging that to the null object layer.
And by doing this, we're linking the radar clips to the null object, which holds the tracking data.
So that was the tracking part.
Let’s focus a bit more now on the details of the actual radar.
First up I'm going to change the blending mode of the two radar clips to Linear Light.
That way, they blend a bit better with the actual clip.
The outer circle comes a bit in front of her eye lid.
So we'll need to cut out a piece from that.
Select the outer radar clip, then take the Pen tool from your toolbox on top.
Now simply draw a mask around the visible eye.
The mask has been applied to that layer you had selected,
so when we open up the properties of the outer radar, you'll see that mask.
Within the mask properties,
we'll increase the feather a tiny bit, so that the edge isn't so hard.
Your talent is probably moving, so we'll also need to track the mask.
But this is very easy though. There're two ways to track a mask inside After Effects.
You could either do this manually. Just enable the animation stopwatch for the Mask Path
and change your mask shape each frame you move forward.
A second way, is by simply right-clicking on your mask, choosing Track Mask.
And that will open up the Track Mask window from which you can press Play
to automatically track that mask with the movement of your talent's eye.
And that's all there is to track a radar inside someone's eyes.
Now let's focus on the glitches.
Like we can also see in the actual music video, the red, green and blue channels are offset.
And to be able to do that we will also need to duplicate our clip three times.
Now of course, we want to take everything that we've just created.
So we'll select all of the layers from our composition, right-click and say Pre-compose.
Just hit OK and that will group all of our clips together.
Now this group, we'll also duplicate two times.
Simply hold down your control key and hit D two times.
Then head over to your Effects Library and search for Set Channels.
You may already drag this to all the three groups.
Select the first group, and then from your Effects controls
we're going to set the green source to off and the blue source as well to off.
The top clip will now only show its red channel.
Now do the same thing for the second layer,
but here we'll put the red channel to off, the green stays at green
and the blue is set to off.
And the final clip will have its red and green set to off and blue to blue.
Then head back to your layers and set the blending mode for the top two clips to Lighten.
And this will blend the three color channels back together like nothing happened.
But here's the cool trick.
If you would offset the position from one of these clips,
which you can do from the layer's properties,
you will see this awesome RGB split.
So now you can just animate the position for the two top layers for a few frames
so that it looks like a distortion.
And of course, since we are changing the position of the clips,
you might wanna change the scale of all three clips as well.
For example, set them all to 120.
And that is how you can create an RGB glitch effect inside After Effects.
Thank you all so much for watching, and if you would like to see us every week...
...with a new breakdown from a popular music video or film,
make sure to hit that subscribe button down below.
And like always,
stay creative!
We needed a lot of blue light coming from the front for this shoot,
now, adding gels to our soft-boxes is not that easy,
so we got a great tip from Robert over at the Aputure user group in Facebook
and you can kinda create these cones off from your gels,
they pop right on top of your 120Ds or 300Ds,
and on top of that goes your soft-box.
Like that!