Oh!
Hey guys!
It's Jordy here
for Cinecom.net
and welcome to Copycat Friday,
where we recreate effects from famous films and music videos and...
I don't know what to say anymore, so let's get into the video, guys.
Thank You Gilles for that
great contribution.
Such a weird guy.
Anyways, I'm Yannick for Cinecom.net
and welcome to another Copycat Friday.
Like you saw,
in this week's video we are going to do an effect that is old.
Really old.
In fact, it's as old as me.
The effect that I'm talking about is a face morphing from Michael Jackson's music video Black or White.
Here you can see multiple people of different races morphing in each other fluently.
Now, we wanted to make this effect for a long time now,
but we were also afraid because we knew it was quite hard to recreate in such a perfect way as they did.
Maybe the special developed face morphing software has something to do with that.
Who knows?
Anyways, this week we made the leap and created an effect that comes really close to the original one.
Now guys, before we start I have
one question:
if you could morph into one person, who would it be?
I think I would...
I would morph into Tony Stark
because I always wanted to be a millionaire,
and of course have an Ironman suit.
Now,
let's hit the montage.
♪ Baby, baby, baby, oh ♪
Sorry guys, I forgot that this effect has almost no preparations.
The only thing you need is a tripod that's always on the same spot,
then place each talents on the same eye height
and don't change the tripod height,
but let your talents bend down or stand on something.
You can use a whiteboard marker to draw some guides to help yourself.
Of course, the background is also quite important.
Use a clean background.
This is really a must.
Otherwise, the effect won't work.
Well,
it will work but you'll have some weird distortions in the background.
Then, the last thing you need to keep in mind are the similarities.
Let your talents all wear the same t-shirt to make it yourself easier
and try to keep the forehead as open as possible
because this will be needed for a warping.
Let's begin with the effect, and this we will make in After Effects.
Take the first shot of your talent's face and drag that in the timeline,
then take the shot of the other talent and place that on top.
Now, in the part where the face morph takes place,
we want to stabilize the motion.
So look for the point where the morph will take place and make a cut there.
Select the clip you want to stabilize,
and in the tracker panel choose stabilize motion.
Place a tracking point on something very recognizable of the talent's face, like a nostril.
Click on the analyze forward and let After Effects do its thing.
Then click on apply and the footage is stabilized.
Do the exact same thing with the second clip and all the other clips you want to morph.
Now the stabilization won't be that drastic because the talent will stand still,
but it will remove that super small shake from their heads.
Now for the part that takes the most time,
warping the face of the talents to match each others.
Take the top talent's clip and drag that to the right so that the two talents just overlap.
Then lower the opacity of the top clip to 50% and lock the clip.
This will make sure that we see what we are doing and never select a wrong clip.
Then, in the effects library look for the mesh warp effect and drag that to the bottom clip.
Set the rows to twenty-four,
the columns to twenty-eight and the quality to ten.
Then place your playhead on the point where the two clips first overlap.
Here you can enable the animation for the distortion mesh and create a keyframe.
Next, go to the last point where the two clips overlap.
This is where we are going to mesh warp the bottom talents face to the top one.
I'm not going to show you each step I made when warping the talent's face,
but it's quite obvious.
Just warp everything important,
such as the eyes,
the nose,
the hair,
the mouth,
the jawline,
ears.
Just every part of the face.
Really let the two talents match and you will get this.
Ah!
Wow!
That is one ugly person.
Next, we want to do exactly the same with the top talent's face.
However, here we want the face to start distorted and overtime animate back to the original.
So add the mesh warp effect,
go to the last point where the two clips overlap
and make a keyframe for the distortion mesh.
Again, go to the first point where the two clips overlap, and here you can now distort a second face.
Try to match the other one as much as possible.
You can really go into detail, but this will probably take some time.
However, it's worth it.
Next will be precomping each layer into a new composition.
Take the first clip,
right click on it and select Pre-comp.
Choose to move all attributes to a new composition option and press ok,
then do exactly the same with the second layer.
We are using the pre comp method because mesh warps can't really handle masks and will go crazy.
Now that is crazy!
You know, what else is crazy, besides my crazy set, than me?
Storyblocks Video, because on there you can download unlimited video assets,
such as visual effects.
There are overlays, we got backgrounds, we got 4k high quality stock clips.
There are even collections so that you can find the stock clips in the same style.
And the most crazy things, above everything on Storyblocks, are their After Effects templates.
Whether it's a photo slideshow, an intro sequence or a logo reveal,
you can just swap your own assets in there in a matter of seconds
and have yourself something really cool.
And you're probably thinking now "Jordy, that's not so crazy."
Well, actually it is because you can download unlimited of these video assets without having to pay extra.
There's only a single price per year, and that's it.
It's super cheap as well,
so make sure to click the first link in the description down below to start downloading right now.
It shouldn't have done that.
Back to you, Yannick.
Now that the warping part of the face is done,
it's time for the next step,
which will be revealing the face.
Select the top clip and duplicate it multiple times.
We are going to use these duplicates to mask out different parts of the face
so you can use as much duplicates as you want.
Of course we want to give each clip a proper name,
so that our workflow stays clean.
You can use names as mouth, left eye, right eye, and so on.
Just make it clear.
Let's start with the beard and make that come in.
Take the pen tool and draw a mask around the beard
and feather that mask.
Now, if you want you can always animate the mask pad so that the mask opens up over time.
And to really make it appear, you can also animate the opacity.
Let this animate from zero to one hundred over time
and do this in the exact same time span as a mask animation.
Let's say that they both can be around seven or eight frames.
Now for the other elements, such as the hair or the eyes,
you can do exactly the same.
Again use a mask and opacity
to let them come in.
However, the trick is to let them come in on the right time and speed.
Now, sadly there isn't a golden rule for this,
just trial and error.
We just played around with all the face elements,
trying to figure out which looks best when coming in first and so on.
And in the end of the morph transition,
you of course need the entire clip of the second talent to come in.
This will complete the morphing effect and leave you with only the second talent.
Oh!
Hey guys,
it's Jordy here
for Cinecom
.net
and welcome to Copycat Friday,
where we recreate effects from famous films and music videos and...
I don't know what to say anymore so let's get into the video, guys.
And that was it for the morph effect.
However,
let's do one small
Yannick's Fun Fact Fountain!
Did you know that the morph effect is quite old?
Heck, it's even older than me.
The first known fact about morphing is from the 16th century,
where they use it in paintings.
How does that work?
If you want to know more about that just look up Lenticulrrrll...
Lenticulrrr...
Lenticular.
Lenticular paintings.
Yeah look that up.
Now, in the film industry they were also quite early with morphing stuff.
In the Narren-grappen short movie,
I hope you pronounce it like that,
you can see one of the first morphing effects ever done in a movie.
And this was in 1910.
How insane is this?!
1910.
But that was it for today guys.
Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video.
Thank you Storyblocks Video for the support.
And like always...
Stay creative!
Actually guys, I'm not that crazy, and neither is my set.
It makes completely sense because I'm working on a new class for Skillshare about color correction
inside Adobe Premiere Pro.
I know it makes no sense.
I thought to be a great painter and be a colorist that way.
Can I stick my toe in here? That would be nice.