In the previous videos in this series we've used new animation technologies to
reanimate the Simpsons Rick and Morty and create whatever this is now let's
try and fix Star Wars rise of Skywalker
with the rise of Skywalker on the horizon we all know that the best way to
end an epic and beloved story is to turn the strong female lead evil at the end
for no reason so let's take this shot from the trailer and see how we can turn
Rey to the dark side with some simple animation techniques I'll be using EBsynth
which is a software that will apply the style of a single frame to the
whole scene it's got some limitations but on a shot like this with little movement
it should be useful we need to export the shot as an image sequence which I've
done in After Effects this first frame here is the most zoomed out where we can see
the most background so let's choose this one as our keyframe and take it into
Photoshop I found some references for the Emperor and then first I darkened
her top and desaturated the skin with an adjustment layer using the selection of
her skin as a mask I had add a curves adjustment layer to darken the lips and
around the eyes using a mask to only affect those areas then I painted the
saggy face wrinkles and discoloration of the eyes with the brush tool just using
a round brush with the opacity set to pen pressure this is our final frame
with EB synth open I added the new keyframe which we just made then added
the image sequence for original footage choose one number frame it was and then
hit synth and this could take a while depending on how long a shot is and the
resolution of each frame here is what EBsynth rendered
it's not bad
the change of the color to the skin and to the top are pretty much flawless
but these wrinkles are jiggling all over the place clearly wasn't enough
information in the original footage to track to if we look at the original
footage there's not much contrast around the cheek areas it's mainly a sort of
one flat fleshy color it doesn't change but frame to frame I did hope this would
turn out better for a first shot but working in motion design is all about
problem solving so there's a few things that we can do to fix this
it's the wrinkles that's the problem they're moving too much and they shouldn't
really be moving at all so I'm going to try to track the static wrinkles to the
motion of this shot so let's hide this EB synth layer I'm
gonna create a new null I'll rename that track 01 because we've always label
our layers I want to select our original clip go to the tracker window over here
if you can't see your tracker window go over to window and should be under
tracker if you can't see it in your workspace already and then we're gonna
select track motion this will bring up a single tracking point and we want to
select scale to track to the position and scale of race head because
the face is gonna get bigger as the camera gets closed so this gives us two
tracking points it's best to select areas of high contrast that don't change
much in the scene so we're gonna select Rey's hair over here and then with this
tracking point I want to select Rey's eyebrows at this side because those
areas have some high contrast and stay pretty stationary compared to race
movement throughout the shot we're gonna select our target and make sure that is
layer one out tracking null and we're gonna select the play button which will
analyze this video forward it'll take a minute or so and then let's click apply
now the position and scale data from that track is now keyframed on to our
null and if we scrub through we can see it's reasonably accurate now into this
composition I'm going to add the still that we made of Rey or Palpatine up and
I want to parent that to our we're tracking null using the pick whip and with that
pen tool selected up here let's draw a rough mask around Rey's face
that tracking isn't bad but you can clearly tell that it's just a still over her face let's
turn on our Ebsynth layer again so we can see that underneath now you can see it
matches much better but the head still kind of sticks out a bit we need to get
back that movement in the eyes nose and mouth that were all pretty good from
that EB synth layer so that's on that still we're gonna draw another mask
which is gonna go around her eyes nose and mouth and we're gonna bring up and
masked probabilities with m on the keyboard and we're gonna set our mask to
to subtract which is just gonna reveal the eyes nose mouth underneath
you'll still see a pretty crisp edge here so let's feather that mask by pressing
F on our keyboard let's make that about 30 now for play that back the wrinkles
are static and the rest of the face is a subtle movement and blinking now it's
still not totally convincing but there's a few more things to help make the scene
more believable add some flame and the particles now you
could make these in trapcode particular or even CC particle world but on Mitch
Martinez comm which has provided a bunch of free for Kate stock footage including
a whole lot of amber particles that are perfect for this what you see is you're
going to notice them everywhere even in ads and movies all over the place so
let's drag that footage into our composition set the blending mode to
screen scale it down now that we've got some additional destruction happening
let's add a camera shape to add some camera shake I'm going to add another
new null parent out footage and our tracking null to add a new camera shake
null open up its position and I'm gonna alt click the position stopwatch to open
up our expression window and add the expression wiggle 12 comma 3 and what
this expression does it will increase the position 12 times per second up to 3
pixels and if we play back with this rapid little shifting of everything
which mirrors a camera shake and let's scale this up to 101 percent as well so
we don't get any little black edges as that footage slips outside the
composition window and this quick camera shake gives the whole scene a bit more
weight to something destructive happening but more importantly it hides
and distract from the imperfections in this track and the compact of this new
face now these techniques with the particles
and the camera shake can be a bit overused and used as a crutch but I was
desperate let's have a tiny bit of color correction with an adjustment layer and
the curves effects applied just to make that orange pop a bit more after the
shot we're done now this certainly wouldn't hold up in a studio setting or
under a lot of scrutiny from a VFX enthusiast but for two hours messing
around in Photoshop After Effects and some free software it's not bad I also
made a version replacing Rey's face with chewie which works as horribly as you
might expect and on with jar jar binks as well this once again is not great but
also not terrible for how different the faces are and we can all agree that this
trilogy is missing some desperately needed Jar Jar
I'm thinking of doing a video with baby Yoda next in this series so how should
I've vandalise him with animation let me know down
in the comments please let me know down in the comments what other animated
properties you'd like to see me vandalize for this and some other
cutting edge software I'll see you in the next video
Subtitle: Zoe J Marriott