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Bounty Hunter, I have an assignment for you.
There's a Jedi in the area who survived Order 66. Eliminate him.
As you wish.
Guys, we are doing another Star Wars video.
Oh, how I love Star Wars.
Maybe I should convince Jordy to do a Star Wars short film.
What do you guys think?
But anyways, I'm Yannick for Cinecom.net and welcome to another copycat Friday.
And today we are having a look at the new Star Wars series called 'The Mandalorian.'
I've been waiting for this series for quite a while and had some high expectations for it.
So let's hope they don't screw it up, like, for example, Game of Thrones.
But, that aside, today we are recreating a typical weapon from Star Wars.
And, no, it's not the cool lightsaber of the Jedi or the Sith Lord
but the laser blaster that everyone else uses in the Star Wars universe.
However, this would be the second time that we would mention a lightsaber in our video
and I'd show you guys how to recreate them.
So to avoid the Dark Side, let me just do a super quick mini-tutorial about it.
The first thing you need is the free saber plug-in of Video Copilot.
Then inside After Effects, you just place your Jedi shot into a composition.
Next, add a solid layer on top of the Jedi clip and drag the Saber plug-in to the solid layer,
After this, you will already have a saber line on a black background
so you can set the blending mode of the Saber layer to 'Add' and remove the black.
Now for the shape of the lightsaber, you can pick whatever pre-set you want.
Personally, I really like the hardcore preset because this will add more depth to the saber.
Then the last thing you need to do is set the 'Core Start' and End on the right spot.
And, of course, animate them if you move your saber around like in our shot.
This will already leave you with a cool saber effect but we can go much more advanced if you like.
If you want to see that, give this video 10,000 likes and we will make it.
And now that we have that out of the way, we can do a Yannick Fun Fact Fountain.
Did you know that the Mandalorian has one of the biggest budgets for a TV series?
They have a budget for over $100 million.
Do you know what you can buy for that kind of money?
That's about 500,000 custom lightsabers from the website Saber Forge.
I could start my own Jedi army, or maybe a Sith army..
But you can also plant 100 million trees with that kind of money because Team Trees.
Now to continue with the actual effect of today, the laser blaster.
For this effect, you don't really need to do something special.
Just film your Bounty Hunter shooting like crazy at his target.
One thing I do like to mention and that's recoil.
After Gilles told me that the laser blasters didn't had recoil, I didn't believe him.
However, after doing some research, he was right.
Gilles overclassed me in being a Star Wars nerd.
[existential crisis]
But what I do know is that the fact about stormtroopers being a terrible shot is quite incorrect.
In fact, they are probably one of the best foot soldiers in the galaxy.
When Order 66 was announced,
they managed to slay multiple Jedi's and throughout the history of Star Wars,
they also managed to beat the rebels over and over.
And this is not something you can do by being a bad shot.
But now that we have our shots,
[Ba dum tss]
we can continue with creating the effect.
And, of course, we are working with After Effects today as this will make everything so much easier.
And if you really want to make it yourself easy,
you can use the Saber plugin of Video Copilot to create every laser beam you shoot.
The principle is quite the same as with the lightsaber, but here you just need to animate them off-screen.
However, this is not the technique that we are going to use.
We will create every blast from scratch.
And you start this by placing your shooting shot into a composition.
For the next step, you can create a white solid layer above the shooting shot.
Now from this white solid, we are going to create our laser blast.
To start, set the 'Opacity' to 50% so you can see the underlying clip.
Then, go to the 'Tool Bar' on top and take the 'Pen' tool for creating masks.
At the barrel of your blaster, you can now create a laser-shaped mask.
Try to hold the perspective of the laser into account.
In our shot, This means that the laser will be smaller at the gun and bigger at the site where it's going to.
This is because the laser is moving to the screen.
If it would move away from the screen, the perspective would be different, of course.
Next, you can enable the animation for the 'Mask Path' and go about 12 frames further in time.
Then move the mask of the screen and also adjust the mask
so that it looks like the laser blast is becoming bigger as it's coming towards us.
Once you have done this, set the 'Opacity' back to 100 and you can also feather the mask.
At the beginning, set the feather to around 5.
Again, enable the animation for the feather and at the end set it to around 30.
Okay, now you already have a white laser shooting out of your blaster, but let's make it the iconic red.
Again, create a new solid layer, but this time make it red and place it underneath the white solid.
To begin, you can change the blending mode of the white solid to 'Add.'
Then copy the mask of the white solid and paste that to the red solid.
When doing this, make sure that you are standing in the beginning of your timeline.
Otherwise, your keyframes won't match.
Of course, you can select the keyframes and drag them in the right spot but this will cost you a few seconds.
Once you have pasted the mask, it's time to adjust the feather.
For the mask of the red solid, you can set the begin feather to around 15
and for the end feather, you can set it to around 130.
Now you will already have a nice red glow but let's add a little bit more.
So duplicate the red solid underneath everything and, again, adjust the feather.
You can leave the begin keyframe the same but move the end keyframe to the middle of the layer
and set this to around 200.
This already looks a lot better.
However, you can keep tweaking the laser by adding more glow if you want.
You can even lower the opacity of the white solid so that it becomes more red.
You can really customize the laser to your liking, even the color.
To do this, select the red solid layer and go up to the 'Layer' menu.
Here, you can click on the 'Solid' settings options which will open a new pop-up window.
Choose your new color and boom! Your laser is green.
But because our bounty hunter is quite evil, we are going to stick with the red color.
Now to keep our work flow clean, We are going to pre comp all the solids of the laser
and move all attributes into a new composition.
This will combine all the solids in one layer, which is much cleaner.
The next thing you can do now is set the blending mode of the pre-comp layer to 'Add.'
Okay, we already have the basic laser. So now we can start by adding the details.
First, let's add motion blur to the laser and this you can easily do by adding the effect 'Force Motion Blur.'
Now, I find the shutter angle of 180 a little bit too much.
So let's reduce that to 90.
This will give us a nice subtle motion blur.
The next step I want to explain to you guys is the light casted on your shooter by the laser.
For this effect, you need to duplicate the original layer of the shooter.
And with this layer selected, you can now mask out his head and stomach separately.
These are the body parts that are going to catch the light from the blaster.
And. of course, you also need to feather the mask of those.
Once they are masked out, you can now add the 'Curve' effect to the duplicate layer.
Then within the effect, you can now set the channel to red and, in the grid, drag the red line up.
This will make your shot more red, however, not more bright
and it should be more bright because the blaster lights it up.
To fix this, you can also add the 'Lumetri' effect to the duplicate layer
and increase the 'Exposure' a little bit along with the highlights and the whites.
Now because the laser blast is just a quick flash, this extra light on your actor also needs to be a quick flash.
So look for the point where your actor just shoots.
Here, you can enable the animation for the 'Opacity' and set it to zero.
Here, you can go one frame further in time and set the 'Opacity' to around 50.
Again, go further in time and set it to 0.
This will leave you with a short light flash on your body while you shoot and if I must say it already looks cool.
But you can still add some small details to really finish it like a muzzle flash.
Which is crucial when shooting a gun.
I also changed the color of the flash to something more red.
This you can easily do by adding the 'Tint' effect to the muzzle layer.
Inside the effect, you can now change the 'Map White' option to a light red color
and this will leave you with a matching muzzle flash.
The last thing you can now do is maybe add a small lens flare to the barrel to really sell it.
And, of course, don't forget to add that iconic laser blaster sound from Star Wars.
After this, you're finished.
[shwing]
[pew pew pew]
And that was it for today, guys.
I hope you enjoyed the video because we really enjoyed making it.
Thank you so much for watching.
Thank you Storyblocks Video for the support.
And, like always, stay creative.