This video is sponsored by audible. Start a 30-day trial
and your first audiobook is for free.
Go to audible.com/cinecom or text Cinecom to 500-500.
[Music]
-Pretty cool effects, right?
Well, these come from the music video Human, by Rag 'n' Bone.
Now, let's see inside Adobe Premiere Pro how we can recreate them.
[Cinecom's intro music]
Hey guys, Jordy here for cinecom.net and welcome to Copy Cat Friday,
a weekly series where we recreate an effect from a film or music video!
And Human, from Rag 'n' Bone, has been out for several years now,
but I think that we've all seen the clip or at least heard the song.
Their music video has this simplicity which reflects greatly on the song.
And there're several transitions or visual effects in there
which are really awesome, and we're going to show you guys today how to create them.
-Yannick yesterday built a brick wall.
Can you give some more explanation about that?
-So, in the Rag 'n' Bone video you can see that he's standing in front of a brick wall.
We don't have that.
So, we designed one in Photoshop.
It's currently printing, so hopefully we have the banner this afternoon
so we can start filming.
-So, yesterday evening we ordered a huge wall print...
Argh! luckily with some speed delivery we got it.
Damn, this is heavy!
[Music]
-There we go, guys! We got ourselves a brick wall in the studio,
and now I'm thinking that it was probably a lot easier
to just go to an abandoned place and shoot over there.
The first effect is going to be a stop-motion travel.
Important is that your actor stands really still
and also moves exactly the same with the camera.
So we came up with a very cheap solution.
From the hardware store I got several wheels that we can drill into a platform.
We had this platform laying around, but you can also just use any other plank.
Just make sure that you can take some distance between the actor and the camera
while they sit both on that platform.
-A good tip is to move the lighting with your subject as well,
so that's why we've attached some lighting on the platform too.
And I'm also going to run with a lighting in my hand
while following the subject as a back lighting.
Now, this effect works best if you have a textured background
and some objects, like these pillars that we quickly built.
Even though we're going for a stop-motion, we are actually going to film it.
But make sure to set a fast shutter speed.
Something of around 150 would do.
Roll on the wheels and take your shot.
You can then bring it all into Adobe Premiere Pro.
I already have my clip in the timeline.
With the Rate Stretch tool, I can push this clip to make it go faster.
Don't be afraid to make it go pretty fast,
since your travel shot was probably going slow.
Once you're satisfied with the speed, right-click on the clip and choose Nest.
From the Effects Library, I search for the Posterize Time effect
and drag that to the nested sequence.
Set the frame rate to around 12 to fake that stop-motion effect.
And if you want your travel to come back, simply duplicate the nested sequence,
right-click and choose Speed: Duration.
Check Reverse Speed and hit OK.
[Music]
Next up will be the face transitions, also a very nice effect!
It's important here again that you film from a tripod.
Use the guidelines on your monitor to align the eyes of your subject
and then ask if they can sit perfectly still.
You can also use a water maker to draw a dot on your display.
Keep the camera rolling and swap your subject with someone else.
Here also align their eyes to that exact same marking on your display.
Finally you wanna take an empty shot with no one in it.
After you got it all, we can bring it again into Premiere Pro.
Start off by placing that empty shot on the bottom.
On top of that, place your first talent for a few seconds.
On top of that you load in all the other faces,
you can also duplicate some of the same faces,
but make sure that they don't appear twice after each other.
Then add a cross dissolve to all the clips for both the beginning and the ending.
For the clip on the top, you can delete the ending dissolve.
The clip on the second track only gets an ending fade out.
Now trim every clip so that it takes up about 10 frames,
except for the first clip in track number 2,
and create a stair shape in your timeline.
Next, add the Linear Wipe effect to the clip in the third track.
Change the angle to about 120° and feather it a bunch.
Then animate the transition completion from 100 to 0 to reveal the face.
One you've got it, copy the Linear Wipe effect and paste it over to the others.
And if everything went well, you got yourself a sweet face transition!
[Music]
And that brings us to the last transition!
You wanna make a travel around your talent, but it has to be quite precise.
That's why we first took a chord and some chalk to draw a line on the ground.
After that, you take a measurement of around 30 cm or 12",
and add those markings on that circle.
Now, place your tripod on that circle with the two front legs,
align your left leg with the first marking,
and like with the first effect, try to use one of the display markers to align your subject.
Snap a picture, and then move your left leg to the next marker,
align your subject and snap again a picture.
Do this for the entire round. You can also make multiple rounds,
but each time with a different focal length.
In Premiere Pro, the first thing I'm gonna do is head over to Edit from the menu,
Preferences and then Timeline.
Here you wanna set the Still Image Duration to one frame.
When I'm now going to drag all the pictures into the timeline,
they will only be one frame long.
Your effect should already work, but probably not so smooth.
And tat's why I'm going to nest everything together
and on that group, I will add the Warp Stabilizer.
After the analyzation is complete,
you wanna set the Smoothness to around 2, or maybe 5%.
And this was a great tip that we got from Kyle Ackeron on our previous video
where we did something similar.
[Music]
And those were the 3 effects from Rag 'n' Bone - Human!
Now I wanna talk about a brief moment about Audible, which is a library of audiobooks.
And it was actually quite interesting when they contacted me.
Because, you know, I really don't like to read books,
which I mentioned a while back in another video,
so this was very interested to me in trying this one out.
They have many books about the art of filmmaking
and I decided to give Screenwriting one-o-one by Agnus Fletcher a shot,
since we are currently working on a short film.
And, you know, this was actually very pleasant!
Everyday when I ride to work I let it just play in my car,
it makes those boring trips exciting again.
And what I really love about this audiobook is that the narrator
makes a lot of references to famous films
and that way you can kinda get a good understanding of things that work or don't.
Because you can reflect the theory on the films that you actually saw.
If you like to check it out too, you can start a 30-day trial
and your first audiobook is for free.
Just go to audible.com/cinecom or text Cinecom to 500-500.
Thank you all so much for watching
and like always:
Stay Creative!
-For the past month we've had a heatwave here in Belgium,
It's finally raining now, so I think everyone is going to be very happy.
And it's also thundering so I'm going back inside right now.
-Hello!
-Yannick, it's raining, open the door!
-No!