This video is brought to you by Storyblocks Video
[Sounds coming from tablet]
Okay, I'm not the biggest Sonic fan
but I think this doesn’t really look like him.
[Jordy]: Yannick, I can do way better!
-Can we?
-Yeah!
-Okay, let's do this.
Alright, awesome!
[Energetic music]
-You don’t look like Sonic, Jordy, you’re even worse than the movie.
-Shut up Yannick, I’m 100% Sonic, I’m blue!
[Music kicks back in!]
-Ooh, ooh...
[Cinecom's intro music]
-Ouch, that has to hurt!
But luckily it's my time to present this week's Copy Cat Friday.
So, hello guys, Yannick here for cinecom.net
and welcome to another episode of Copy Cat Friday,
a series where we recreate effects from famous movies and music videos.
And this week we couldn't ignore the trending hype around Sonic.
However, we're not making him look better,
in fact, Jordy looks even worse.
But we are going to recreate a Super Speed.
At first we had the idea of doing the speedy rolling thing Sonic does,
but after a whole day of trying to make it work we decided not to do it.
This was because none of us were familiar with 3D,
so we had to work in a 2D plane.
Sadly, this doesn't look very realistic, or even good.
So, to maintain our high standards we went for the regular high speed run of Sonic.
Of course, with the lightning and the long trail behind him.
But before we can start creating this awesome effect inside After Effects
we first need our shots.
And of course, I also want to thank our sponsors Storyblocks Video.
This is an online library packed with studio-quality stock clips, video effects,
animations, templates, logo reveals and so much more.
There’s only one single price per year which allows you to download
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which makes their library so interesting.
I can highly recommend to try it out and see for yourself
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For more information you can follow the first link in the description below.
Ok Jordy, time to become Sonic!
[Music]
-These are Yannick’s shoes, way too small!
-Ahh.
-Don’t be silly Jordy, don't be silly!
-I’ve got a bigger size than you Yannick, mine's bigger!
-It’s what you do with it.
-…Wait a second!
Billie Eilish has blue hairs that means I'm gonna die my hair.
Is it blue yet?
No, this time I'm definitely sure, this is blue.
-I think I sprayed a little bit too much…
…on the wrong part of the face.
-Yeah, it's on my face Yannick, exactly, it’s hairspray not facespray.
But at least I'm looking like 100% legit, like Sonic.
-Okay, now that Jordy is ready to play his part
we can make the shots we need for this effect,
The first one is a shot of his shoes,
the second one is a close-up of his face,
and the last one is the shot where he is ready to run.
With the last shot you frame him on the right side,
so that he has some room to run.
Then when he runs out of the shot keep your camera rolling
so you can take an empty shot.
All these three shots have to be on the tripod.
We do this so we don't have to track the shots inside After Effects
when we're adding all the effects to them.
Okay, now that we have everything it's time to open up After Effects
and start with the effects.
The first one that I'm going to explain are the lightning bolts,
when he is readying up.
Take the shot of the shoes and load it into a new composition inside After Effects.
Then we are going to add a layer to put a lightning effect on it,
so go to Layer, New and select Solid.
The colors of the solid don't really matter so you can press OK in the solid settings.
The first thing you can do with the solid is trim it shorter.
As the lightning bolt is a quick flash, you can make the layer around 0.5 second
or 12 frames.
Now you can look for the Advanced Lighting Effect in the Effects Library
on the right.
Select it and drag it to your solid layer.
Normally, you immediately get a lightning bolt.
But it doesn't really look that good.
So let's start tweaking the settings.
The first thing you can do is set the lightning type to Strike,
then within the Core settings you can increase the radius to around 15
and decrease the core opacity to around 60%.
Also change the color to a light blue or whatever you like.
Next up are the glow settings,
here you can lower the opacity to zero as we are going to add a glow later on.
As a final adjustment set the turbulence to 6 and the forking to 15%.
When you have followed along the lightning bolt should look like this,
but it's over the entire shot, not really what we want.
So with the origin and the direction
we can place the lightning where we want, on the shoes.
First we place the origin to start from the ground,
when it's on the right spot you can enable the animation for it.
Then place the direction on the same spot as the origin.
This will make the lightning disappear.
Now also enable the animation for the direction.
Go further in time to almost the end of the layer
and animate the direction to where it has to go.
This will make the lightning come out of the ground shooting up to the shoe
but we also want to make it go up into the shoe.
This you can do by taking the keyframe from the origin
and placing it near the end of the layer.
When it's placed, go further to the end
and animate the origin to the exact same spot at the direction.
With these two animations combined you'll now have a lightning bolt
shooting from the ground to the shoe and in the shoe.
But the lightning is quite static,
so to give it more motion I'm going to animate the Conductivity State.
This however, I'm going to do an Expression, to make it ourselves easier.
I’ll click on the stopwatch of the Conductivity State,
within the Expression text box, type the expression ‘wiggle(10,20)’.
This will animate the lightning automatically,
and now you'll have this cool looking lightning bolt.
An extra detail you can add
is a small light detail on the starting point of the lightning.
Create a new solid layer but this time give it a very light blue color.
Again trim the layer shorter,
let it start one frame before the lightning layer
and let it end where the first keyframe of the Origin is.
Now with the blue solid selected, take the Ellipse tool from the Tool Bar on top
and mask out a very small circle around the beginning point of the lightning.
You can now set the blending mode to ‘Lighten’ and feather the mask a bunch.
The last thing I now want to do is animate the opacity for the lightning spot.
Enable the animation for the opacity in the beginning of the layer
and set it to 0.
Go one frame further and set it to 50%.
Now that's all there is to it for making this cool lightning bolt.
All the other lightning bolts work exactly the same.
So you can duplicate the first layer you made
and change the animations for this duplicate.
Let them start on a different spot on the ground or on the shoe,
you can also make them shorter in time,
and if you really want, you can change the settings
from the Advanced Lightning effect.
Just keep duplicating and changing them until you have enough lightning bolts.
After you have a cool bundle of lightning bolts
shooting from the ground to the shoe,
it’s time to add some glow to it.
Select every lightning and light layer,
right-click on the layers and go to Precompose.
Name your layer whatever you want and press OK.
In the Effects Library I'm going to look for the Glow effect
and drag that to the precomposed layer.
Inside the Effects Control panel I start changing the settings for the Glow effect.
Let’s start with the glow threshold, which you can decrease a bunch.
The glow radius is next and can be increased a lot.
For the glow intensity you can increase it a little.
Now for the colors of the glow we are going to take A and B colors.
These can be changed to something blue.
For A I took some light saturated blue and for B I went a little bit lighter.
Now the last thing you need to do for this lightning
is set the blending mode from the layer to ‘Add’.
I know it's a little bit much, but let's admit, this looks pretty cool!
-Okay, so the only thing you need to run as faster as Sonic is lightning.
[Jordy whistling]
-Ah, Lorenzo, still so young and so much to learn.
But there can only be one Sonic and that’s Jordy.
Now let's get further with the next effect.
Here we are going to recreate the trail behind Sonic.
Take the shot of your subject where he starts running
and place it into a new composition.
Then take an empty background and place it underneath the running clip.
Now take the playhead and go further in time
to the point where your subject starts running.
Here you can make a cut by pressing the short key ‘ctrl+shift+D’.
Now it's time to mask out Jordy.
We are going to do this with the rotobrush.
So double-click on the new layer after the cut
and take the rotobrush tool from the toolbar above.
Within the layer window you can now rotobrush the subject.
Just go with the green brush roughly over the body of your talent.
The brush tool will now make an automatic selection.
Everything that is too much you can remove by holding the Alt key
and brushing over it.
Now use the page down button to go further in time
while you are adjusting the rotoscope mask.
This doesn't need to be super detailed
as we are going to add motion blur on the result later on.
So any mistakes will be covered.
Now when you completely rotoscoped the subject,
go back to the Composition Panel.
Here we can now see that Jordy is completely masked out.
Now it's time to make him move faster.
Right-click on the masked out layer and select Time and then ‘Time Stretch’.
In the new pop-up window you can set a stretch factor to 50%.
If you now play this you can see that Jordy is already moving faster.
But it's still not enough.
So open up the Position property for the masked out clip
and enable the animation 1 frame before the clip starts.
Then move 10 frames further in time and move the clip to the left
outside of the frame.
Of course don't forget to give the beginning keyframe Ease Out.
After this, you can enable the motion blur,
giving the effect some extra realism.
Next up, it’s the trail behind Jordy.
Duplicate the layer of speedy Jordy by pressing ctrl+D.
Right click on the duplicate and select ‘Precompose’.
Name the new layer, select ‘Move all attributes into the new composition’
and press OK.
Then open up the new trail composition in the Project panel.
For this new composition I want to add some extra motion blur
to the animation of Jordy.
This will make the trail longer.
So go up to the menu on top and click on Composition,
Composition Settings and go to the Advanced tab.
There you can change the shutter angle to 720 degrees and press OK.
Now in the new composition, select the layer of Jordy and duplicate it.
Move this duplicate one frame to the right and then do this 4 more times.
Duplicate and nudge.
After you have done this, go back to the original composition
and here you can also move the precomposed layer
one frame to the right.
Now you can already see a trail behind Jordy.
However, I don't like it yet.
So set the blending mode from the precomposed layer to ‘Screen’.
I also want to make it more random
and that's why I'm adding the Turbulent Displace effect to it.
The only thing you need to change in the Effects Control panel
is the amount to 40.
Now just duplicate the trail layer two more times.
This will make it more prominent and look better.
However, there’s one more detail I want to add.
I know it's a long video but this will really finish it,
so stick by me.
Select the empty background layer and duplicate it.
From the Effects library take the Glow effect and drag it to the new background.
Go up to the Effects Controls and change the settings.
Set the threshold to 40, the radius to 530 and the glow intensity to 0.5.
Again, for the colors we are going to use the A and B colors.
Set them both to something light blue.
Ok, now we have a glow all over the shot.
Not something we want.
So take the Pen tool and mask out the glow underneath the trail.
Also don't forget to feather the mask a bunch.
Of course we are going to need to animate the mask,
as there's no glow when Jordy starts running
and when he's off the screen.
So enable the animation for the mask path
and adjust the mask so that it follows the trail perfectly.
And last but not least, change the opacity from the new background
from 100 to 50, and you can also change the blending mode to ‘Add’.
-Whoo, that's all there is to it to make this very cool Sonic SuperSpeed effect!
That was it for today, guys,
I hope you enjoyed this very long video,
thank you so much for watching, thank you Storyblocks for the support
and like always:
Stay Creative!
-You don't look like Sonic, Jordy, you’re even worse than the movie!
-Shut up, Yannick this is 100% legit!
I’m blue, so I'm Yannick… sorry.
I’m Yannick…