Hey, I'm Tom from FXhome by Artlist. Like many of you, we're huge fans of Stranger Things and
with the release of season four we thought it was a great time to bring you some effects that
you can do from home to integrate into some of the content that you're making there are
so many effects that we could have chosen from but the one that stood out to us was
the levitation effect used on max during Vecna's curse. All of this can be done
for free using our powerful editor, HitFilm. If you haven't tried it already then you
can follow the link in the description of this video or head on over to fxhome.com
now in order to do the levitation on the show they used a wire rig then in post-production they
removed all the wires now of course we don't have budget for that and we want to make this as diy
as possible so instead what we're going to do is first take a clean plate this is a shot that you
get when you're doing any form of masking what you want is a shot of your environment with not much
going on no movement no actors no nothing it's clean we'll be using this to put our actor into
later in post we then set up a pop-up green screen these are really affordable foldable green screens
that you could take anywhere and they just inflate and then away you go not inflate unfold they're
great things to have in your filmmaking arsenal now we could have filmed louisa on the green
screen here in the studio like we have done in the past with many of our projects but by doing it in
the environment you're automatically capturing the light that you have on set and you don't have to
recreate it in the studio it's cheap and affordable and a really easy way that you
can just recreate that light because it's already there you're also getting the wind and the motion
and everything is looking as natural as possible so then she just had to act out the motion of
looking like she's levitating which yes it did look ridiculous and that is all you're gonna
need shot one is your actor performing and shot two is a clean play of your environment great
perfect yeah that's it nice now that the show is done i'm going to show you how we create this
levitation effect and then a couple other tips and tricks that you can use to elevate it to the next
level see what it did there you'll first grab the take of your actor and then bring them into a new
composite shot and once that's set up you can then bring in the clean plate behind this layer
if you shot it with green screen like us then i'm going to show you how to remove that green screen
if you don't need that information because you're using a photo then skip ahead to this point in
the timeline and you can jump ahead okay with the actor layer selected go to the master and select
the pen tool we're going to go around the area of our green screen because that's the only area that
we really want to affect all this grass and trees that we want to keep now we can go to the effects
panel and add the color difference key to the actor layer being sure to keep it set to green
and we'll adjust the minimum and maximum value until we only see our actor if you're
really struggling to see what you're doing then it really helps to enable the map view
this just basically turns everything black and white so you can see exactly what area
that you're removing or keeping once that's done you may need to mask some of the features like if
a hand goes over the green screen or maybe the foot then it just helps to keep that detail in
this is the approach that you would use if you're just using a still photo of someone
levitating you just want to mask around your actor as cleanly as possible until you just have their
figure now with your subject cleaned up all we're going to do is move the anchor point to where the
feet are so with our actor selected i'm going to go into the controls panel down into anchor point
and then i'm just going to move this until it's in the position of where the feet are
now it's just a case of moving that back to where we originally filmed it here's a little tip if you
are ever doing something with the anchor point all you need to do to bring it back to where it was
was copy those values and paste them into position and they'll snap back to the original starting
point so now with the anchor point at the feet we can actually start doing the levitating
so what i'm going to do with position selected is set a keyframe at the beginning of the timeline
or maybe move it to where i want the motion to begin and then scrub to the end of my timeline
and now i can set in another keyframe and raise up the value to a point where i'm
comfortable with if you're doing something with a superhero then maybe you want them to
take off and fly that's perfectly fine but i'm just going to have louisa just kind of like slowly
hover and in order to have that slow ascent i'm just going to select these keyframes and set them
to smooth out which is great that's cool now you have a levitation effect for all your superhero
and demonic possession needs now just a final tweak for this effect because it is quite flat
is i created a new point layer select my actor and clean plate parent them to the point layer
this just means that anything that i do to this point layer will now affect the footage
and just like we did with levitation i'm going to set a keyframe at the start of our timeline
with scale and position and then i'm going to scrub to the end of my timeline and then just
kind of like zoom in a little bit and maybe move it to where louise is now going to be
and again just select these set them to smooth out and it'll kind of like follow as she goes up
that's that's looking good and if you have access to our camera shake effect this is a really nice
touch as well to make it feel very handheld if you're looking to recreate the aesthetic of the
upside down then we have the perfect thing for you we have a free giveaway of these particles
from Artgrid.io all you have to do is follow the link down in the description of the video
to receive your free asset and then bring them into any project that you want all you need to
do is import them into your timeline go to the controls panel and set the blend mode to screen
it's really that easy so download your free asset for the link in the description
and go out and create some stranger things that's it for today's video but if you've enjoyed some
of the music that's been playing throughout then that's because Artlist.io has a brand new
stranger things collection that you can head over right now the link is down in the description
of the video they have the best collection of royalty-free music so go and check them out if
you haven't before until next time i recommend you checking out the video beside me it seems
like it's the best one for you so why not click it and i might just see you in the next video