Today it’s all about making guns go boom.
See this?
This is my BOOMstick!
We’ve already shown you how to film fake guns so that they look real.
Now let’s take a look at how you make them actually do something.
We have two shots and two techniques.
Let’s go.
Shot number one - here we have stuntman Christopher firing off controlled, carefully aimed shots.
When you’ve got a character shooting individual bullets like this, you probably want to hand-craft
the look, which means using stock footage.
Here’s the original clip.
Let’s find a frame where we see a puff of smoke coming out of the prop.
Just before that puff is when we need our muzzle flash to happen.
You can download project files for this tutorial.
Click the infocard or check the video description for the link.
We’re giving away a high quality stock clip, so it’s worth grabbing.
OK, so I’m going to create a point layer and position it over the gun barrel.
Because our muzzle flashes are not too frequent I’m not going to bother doing any tracking
this time round - positioning the point manually is fine.
I’ll rename it to Barrel.
Then I’ll drop my stop clip onto the timeline.
First up I want to get rid of the black background, so I’ll find the Demult effect in the library
and drop it onto the layer.
I’m now going to parent it to our Barrel point, then position and scale the clip until
it looks about right.
Too small and muzzle flashes look silly.
Too big and they’ll look unrealistic.
Once you’re happy with the position, let’s tweak the look.
I’m going to use an Exposure effect, and bump up the exposure to make it look more
intense.
I’m then going to add a Hue, Saturation & Lightness effect, go into the Red channel
settings and drop the saturation all the way down.
This stops it from looking quite so day-glo.
Now here’s the interesting bit.
I’m going to sling the Heat Distortion effect on.
By fiddling with Distortion and Diffusion Strength we can alter the look of the muzzle
flash without changing it’s overall shape.
This is a really neat way to get lots of slightly different muzzle flashes out of a single piece
of stock.
Finally, I’ll put a zoom blur on, which gives the flash a bit more dynamism.
OK, we’re done with the stock.
It’s only a handful of frames, so we don’t need to worry about additional tracking or
animation.
It looks a bit pasted on, so let’s tweak.
I’m going to add a new Plane layer, above the stock, and to that I’ll add a Light
flare.
In the light flare properties I’m going to choose the Sun Glare type, then in rays
I’ll drop the brightness down because I don’t want none of yo rays.
In the Hotspot options I’ll parent the flare to the Barrel point we created back at the
start, and zero out the position so it’s right on top.
I also need to change the blend mode, which I’ll set to None, and then change the layer’s
blend mode to Screen.
Then it’s about tweaking the scale to make the flare nice and big.
I’ll then activate keyframing for the Intensity, and over three or four frames drop it down
to zero.
Finally I’ll use the Slice tool to cut the ends off the layer, which I’ll delete, to
keep things neat and tidy.
So it’s also a good idea in this case to change the light flare color, to better match
the muzzle flash.
I’m going to do that by simply selecting one of the yellows in the flash.
Right, last step.
I’m going to duplicate the video layer, and rename the top layer to Lighting.
I’m then going to select the freehand mask tool, and draw a really rough shape around
the front of Christopher, where I think he’d be illuminated by the weapons fire.
Once I’m happy with the shape, I’ll increase the roundness to smooth it off, put the feather
up to hide the edge, and tweak the expansion if needed.
To this layer I’ll add a Curves effect, and ramp the brightness way up - even so it
clips and blows out - while keeping the blacks solid.
I’ll then animate the layer’s Opacity so that the curves adjustment is only visible
over the frames when the muzzle flash is happening.
And now we have the illusion of Christopher being lit up by the flash, which immediately
adds a HUGE amount of realism to the shot.
It’s one of those elements which an audience will KNOW is missing, even if they can’t
quite pinpoint what’s wrong.
Now, the cool thing about how we’ve set this up is that if we want another muzzle
flash, say over here at this point, all I need to do is select our flare and stock layers,
copy them, and then paste them in over here.
Because these copies are still parented to the Barrel point, all we have to do now is
move that point.
So I’ll head back to our first muzzle flash and activate Position keyframing for our Barrel
point.
Then I’ll go to our second muzzle flash and move the Barrel point to where it needs
to be.
By default we have linear keyframes, which means the point animates between those keyframes.
We don’t actually want that, so I’m going to select both keyframes and switch them to
Constants.
That means that the value doesn’t interpolate between keyframes: it’ll hold on that value
until it reaches the next keyframe, at which point it jumps instantly there.
Because our flare and stock are linked to the point, they both move at the same time,
which saves us having to reposition both elements manually.
SHOT 2 OK, shot #2.
This one is very different, because it’s a much wilder shot, with more movement, and
the character is firing the weapon indiscriminately and rapidly.
Placing individual, stock-based muzzle flashes on something like this would be incredibly
boring.
So let’s not do that.
We’re gonna get procedural.
First up, we’re going to track the gun.
This is actually a little awkward, because it’s a black gun barrel which frequently
passes in front of a very, very dark background.
Tracking a black thing in front of a black thing isn’t ideal.
I’ll create a new tracker using the + icon next to the Tracks group for the layer.
Then I’m going to go into the options for Optical FLow and ramp iterations up to 50.
You don’t normally need to do this, but it’ll help in this case by giving the tracker
more data to work with.
Next I’ll go to somewhere in the middle of the clip where the barrel is visible and
position my tracker over the barrel.
Red rectangle define what we’re looking for, green rectangle defines where we’re
going to look for it on each frame.
OK, let’s go.
This track does require a bit of manual nudging here and there, but on the whole HitFilm does
a pretty good job of figuring out what’s going on.
OK, skipping ahead, I now have my nice track.
Tracking data is just a bunch of numbers until you do something with it, so let’s create
a new Point layer, again called Barrel, and we’ll assign that tracking data to it.
This time, instead of pre-made stock we’re going to use HitFilm’s Gunfire effect, which
can create an infinite variety of custom muzzle flash shapes.
It’s pretty neat.
Once the gunfire effect is on the timeline, I’ll parent it to the tracked barrel point
and make sure its position is zeroed out.
It’s as bit diddy right now, so I’ll scale it up to about 360%.
So the other super cool thing about the Gunfire effect is that it’s in 3D, so I’ll adjust
its orientation to point in the right direction - the great thing about this is that you’re
not limited to stock flashes which always tend to point sideways or towards camera - with
the gunfire effect you can handle any angle.
Now it’s time to dial in all the options so this actually looks good.
Being British, I don’t know for sure what this kind of gun SHOULD look like, so I’m
going to go with what I think looks cool.
Remember that the effect is totally customisable, so you can make it look like whatever you
want.
I’ll start off with the core flare options, tweaking its length, radius and tapers until
I’ve got something nice and punchy.
Then with the side flares I’ll reduce them down to 3, and tweak the barrel gap and barrel
angle before adjusting their size with the length and radius options.
This isn’t an exact science.
In Appearance, I’ll switch the texture to Assault Rifle (Daylight).
You can tweak the color if you want as well.
Now for the cool bit.
Currently our flash is visible throughout the shot, and looks the same all the way through.
I’m going to go to the first frame and activate the Seed property.
THen I’ll jump to the end and change the seed to something else - the specific value
doesn’t really matter.
What this means is that the flash will be randomly generated to look slightly different
on each frame, while still retaining your overall design.
Finally, I’ll drop the rate of fire down, to maybe about 35.
This automatically turns the flash on and off, which is fantastic for a rapid-firing
automatic weapon like this.
No tedious keyframing.
This prop weapon didn’t generate real puffs of smoke, so let’s add those digitally.
Conveniently, there’s a preset in HitFilm 4 Pro called Gunsmoke.
I’m going to drop that on beneath our gunfire layer, and then I’ll go in and find the
emitter shape and parent its position to the Barrel point.
I also need to do a bit of keyframing work to the particle system’s Active property,
turning it on and off at random intervals so that the smoke puffs out every now and
then.
Another good tip for the muzzle flashes is to add a slight blur to them, because the
depth of field on these shots was actually quite shallow.
And that’s pretty much all I need to do, other than maybe dropping the layer’s opacity
down a bit to make it subtler.
The final steps are similar to the other shot - creating a masked duplicate of the video
to create artificial lighting.
The only difference here is that I used the Flicker effect to add random flickering.
The same Flicker trick can be used on a light flare, also parented to the Barrel point.
Another good tip for the muzzle flashes is to add a slight blur to them, because the
depth of field on these shots was actually quite shallow.
There you have it - two very different techniques for creating muzzle flashes.
Which one you use depends on the needs of the shot, and whether you’re dealing with
individual flashes or hundreds of the damn things.
That’s all for this week - many thanks for watching, and remember: if you’re shooting
with guns, always inform the police ahead of time and stay safe.
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