so if you've been scrolling TikTok or Instagram reels lately you've probably come across this
photo cut out collage effect and we've recently recreated this for socials using video instead
of photos and it looks pretty complicated but it's actually really easy to achieve
for free in HitFilm using masking right before we get started let's cover the
basics what is masking masking is a video editing technique that allows you to hide
reveal or change a certain part of a scene rather than just affecting the whole
thing and we can use this effect to cut out certain parts of our footage and
overlay over the other parts to create the collage effect now you can get this effect using either
photos or videos all you need is a nice different selection of shots with different subjects in
let's go on an adventure the problem with iphones is they automatically like try and over expose
the heck out of your footage and you gotta like bring it right down and hope you can save it in
the grade basically now this is um dangerous don't show this to whoever insures the phone
it's gone too dark i'm trying to think the best way to do this that doesn't involve
physically grabbing one how about if i just sit you coat me in bird feed and i
just kind of go like this for a while and then hopefully they'll like block me that would work
now that i have my footage it is time to get to the edit so i'm going to start by just dragging
all of my clips onto the timeline in the order that i would like them to play now the first
clip isn't going to have any masking on it because it's the first clip and if it did there'd be black
marks so we're just going to move straight onto the second clip which will be the first one with
the scrapbook defect on it so go in and right click and make it into a composite sharp now
you don't have to use composite shots if you want to do masking in hitfilm you can just do
it on the main editor timeline however with this project it's going to get very messy if you don't
use composite shots now to make this as clean as possible i'm going to use a single frame while the
footage is animating in so the easiest way to do this is to make sure that your playhead or your
cursor is placed right on the very first frame of the video and then you can click the export frame
button right here so this will bring up a window where you can choose where you want the picture to
be saved and you can save even more time if you just check the reimport to the timeline button
and then this will automatically put the frame right at the beginning just on top of your footage
then on my timeline i'm just going to make sure that this second of photo is played first
and then just drag the video so it begins straight afterward now as you can see we
have a second of a freeze frame and then the video starts moving now the amount of cutouts that you
have will depend on what kind of footage you have how many subjects you have that you would like to
animate in i'm just going to do an example with two cutouts but you can do this effect with as
many steps as you'd like though i think the sweet spot is around one to three so i'm just going to
cut up my picture into the amount of cutouts that i'd like so just using the slice tool to
cut the picture in half because i have two now i'm going to make sure that i've selected the
first picture on the timeline and then switch over to the freehand mask tool and begin to
draw on the picture around one of the buildings as that's what i'd like the first thing to be
popping in my animation you can zoom in on your video preview using the scroll wheel on your mouse
so you can get more precise as well as using the hand tool up here to just drag around your
screen so you can move around without changing the mask just switch back to the mask tool when you're
ready to start editing again and just go through and draw around how precise you'd like to be is
completely up to you i kind of like it when it's not exactly perfect because it's a cut out effect
it's supposed to look a little bit like someone's done it by hand so then you can do the exact same
thing on the next clip so i'm just going to draw around the next building in the exact
same way that i just did with the last one now once i have all of my pictures drawn out you can
see that when i play them back they just play one after the other instead of animating in together
so to fix this just drag out each of the pictures set at the end at the same time which is when the
video begins and as you can see now when you play back they animate in so once you're happy with
your animation on your first clip just go back to the editor timeline and just follow the exact same
steps on every other clip on your timeline now when you come back into the main editor you'll
see that you have loads of shots that play one after the other with the animation and black
underneath so we can now drag the clips so that they slightly overlay each other and the black
on the second clip will then be filled with the short of the previous one and then that creates
the photo collage effect the final step is to pick some music and match your animations to this so
I headed over to artlist.io I actually used their bpm filter to just filter by fast songs because
i feel like this trend works quite well when it's done to something quite fast-paced so i
found one that i liked and i dragged it out onto the timeline so then i went through each of the
composite shots and shortened the length of all of the pictures inside it to about five frames each
and then just closed up all the gaps so it looked the same as before so the length that you choose
will depend completely on the pacing of the music that you pick so if you pick something that's a
little bit slower you'll probably want the clips to be a little bit longer if you pick something
more fast-paced not really sure how you manage that but maybe you need less than five frames
so after the animating impart i'll leave the video part on for longer than the five frames you get a
chance to actually watch the scene move on before the next clip and then drag the next one along to
start the animating in of the next theme so i just finished lining up all of the clips and shortening
down the animation length and putting them on the timeline and creating a little staircase
almost for my video and just like that my video is ready to be posted on socials let us know what you
thought of this type of tutorial in the comments below please comment the algorithm gods have my
family hostage and if we don't get enough comments i'll never see them again see you next time