In celebration of our spring sale going live, which is 30% off storewide, today
we're going to be showing you how to keep things PG when you shoot somebody
in the face. Oli? Don't worry, Tom is okay. You can find the project files for this
tutorial in the description as well as a link to the store and the sale. Let's go
ahead and get started and dive right into HitFilm Pro. The first thing I need
to do with this shot is motion-track it because there is real-life camera shake.
I'm not going to go over every detail because we have a tutorial on this in
the past, but basically what you do is create a point, add a track, and then
track either forwards or backward, depending on your footage. You only need
to track the area that the effect is actually on-screen, you don't need to
track the whole thing, then apply that data to the new point, and now you should
have a point that follows the camera movement when it's shaking. The next step
is to bring in the Particle Simulator effect, so I'll just drag that in here.
And the first thing I want to do is parent that to the point. This is our
motion tracking data. So now the particle simulator will follow the motion of the
camera. Inside the particle simulator, I'll change the shape from point to
circle. This just widens the area that the particles are coming from. I'll
change the Trajectory from Random to Cone so that they go off in a specific
direction, and then eyeball it until they are in the correct direction to be
firing at Tom. In order to see how the particles are behaving, I'll increase the
life to, doesn't have to be 60, just as long as they're on screen the whole time.
So 15, and you can see that that is the correct direction. Then I'll increase the
speed to something much higher like 2500. I don't want the simulation to be
starting at this point, so I'll just go to the area that I actually want it to
start and drag the simulation forward. I also don't
want petals to be continuously coming out of the gun so I'll put my
playhead at the beginning of the simulation and search for Per Second.
Keyframe that, skip forward, and bring it down to zero. So we'll get a blast of
particles and then no more will appear. And I'll just increase that as needed.
Right now the particles don't have any sort of gravity so they're just
continuing off into space. To add gravity come down to Forces and select the plus
icon. Now for the petals themselves - for these we actually went out and got a few
flowers, pulled off a few petals, and put them up against a black background, and
then took pictures. If you want to use all of these textures inside of the
simulation itself, what you want to do is select New Composite Shot. For the
duration I'll count how many pictures I have and use that for the amount of
frames, so 16 in this case. I'll also make it much smaller so maybe 300 x 300 and
then hit OK. Next, select all of the petals and drag them into this composite
shot. I'll right-click, select Transform, and then do Fit to Frame. Now we have all
the textures in here. What we need to do is select them all again and go to Speed/Duration.
Set the Duration to just a single frame. Now you need to space these
out so that they go one after the other. We do have a keyboard shortcut for move
layers to playhead, I've set this to 'T', but you can change it to whatever fits
your needs. What I'll do is just go frame by frame,
press 'T', and move them all. So now if we play it back we have one petal per frame.
In the main composite shot, bring this petal textures into that comp, you can
hide it from view and put it at the bottom. In the settings for the simulator
go to Particle Systems > Appearance > Texture Source, and select Layer. Then for
the Source Layer, choose the composite shot. Right now it's going to pick from
only the first frame, but we want it to do random, which means it will just pick
a single frame from within that comp and use it as the texture. To keep the color,
come down to Color Source and change that to Texture Color, and now we have a
variety of different petals. They're a bit big, so I'll decrease the Scale to
something smaller, and I'll increase the Variation as well, so that they're all
not the same size. For the muzzle flash, you may or may not have noticed that we
had a sunflower there. So what I did was I just got another PNG of a sunflower
and masked it out, and then positioned it at the end of the gun. To help it blend a
bit better, I'll add an Angle Blur onto the sunflower itself, and then match the
direction that the gun is blurring. The petals are currently going in front
of this wall on the right here, when technically they should be passing
through the doorway, so I'll just draw a simple mask using the Freehand Mask Tool
onto that area. And then I'll invert it in the Controls Panel so that it affects
the opposite. Because the camera is shaking, you'll have to activate the
Position property and then go through and just match the motion of the doorway.
And then if it helps you can feather it in the Controls Panel as well. Be sure to
turn on Motion Blur for the particles, that'll really help sell the idea that
they're very fast. If you want to add an additional Blur, you can do that as well.
It can be an Angle Blur or a regular Blur, whatever helps fit the scene a bit
better. This effect was inspired by a Freddie Wong video from a long time ago.
If you haven't seen it, do check it out because it is still pretty cool. If you
go on the sale page, you'll notice an animation that uses a very similar
technique, I just used three Particle Simulators in each side of the screen to
give it that burst. Do let me know if you have any questions down below and don't
forget to check out our sale for 30% off storewide, link is in the description. Hey,
Tom here. As you may have noticed I'm working from home, as are the entire FXhome
team. We are now FXhome. So this is just a little update to let you know
that we are carrying on. We have some content that was made prior to the
lockdown, so there are tutorials coming, some of which are really exciting.
Outside of that, during this time, if you feel bored, if you feel like you need
someone to talk to, do send us a message on Instagram, the forums, or even just on
YouTube. We'll try and respond to as many people as we can. So if there are things
that you want to learn, things that you want to know, give us a shout, we might do
live streams, we might do videos on that content, but from all of us at FXhome -
stay safe and look after yourself.