- [Evan] Hello, hello everyone.
This is Evan Abrams.
And in this after effects tutorial,
we're gonna be creating some atmosphere titles
out of stock footage,
titles remarkably like these ones you're looking at here.
Lots of layered textural elements,
dynamic push in and out through 3D layers,
all made from stock footage.
I'll be trying to show you as much of the process
as possible so that you're able to take these ideas
and apply them to making your own titles
that may even look nothing like these.
We'll talk a little bit about the pre-visualization stage,
sketching up some boards then collecting footage,
treating, isolating and stabilizing that footage
and finally putting it all together
and adding some typography.
My goal here is to take you through
some of the general techniques and methods,
so you're gonna be able to apply this
not just to titles like these, but many of the challenges
the compositing is gonna throw your way.
So without further ado, let's get on with the tutorial.
(upbeat music)
So our process should always begin with some rough sketches.
In my case, truly rough,
though, I like to say charmingly gestural.
I tend to just use large chunky brushes in Photoshop
with primary colors to figure out the proportion
and position of major elements.
And I really recommend any project you do, start here.
Even 10 or 15 minutes of rough sketching
will save you hours of frustration later on.
Once you have your composition planned out,
and I hope you're dreaming big,
you now need to think
about how you're going to accomplish these bold plans.
Will you need perfect control of CG renders?
For example, if I need these lines here
that are gonna be brush fires in the end,
to line up with say the lines of a map
or some other element I'm gonna transition between,
I would probably want to use a particle simulation
of perfect control of the shape of that fire.
But for a lot of this kind of work,
we can make use of stock footage
which is exactly what I'm gonna do today.
No render farms required.
Sometimes you might even find you need to do this
with stock assets to sell a concept
and then replace those stock assets
with purposefully shot pieces of principle,
actors, locations, props, and so on.
But let's have a look at the stock
that I've pulled for this.
To organize most projects of this kind,
I break down all my footage into three major bins.
First are subject or hero clips,
these are usually foreground elements
that are very specific to the subject matter.
I'm doing titles that are gonna feature a lot of rhinos
and there are rhinos in my boards.
So I need clips specifically of rhinos,
but in particular, I'm looking for clips
that will be easy to isolate and easy to stabilize.
So I have control over them later
when I'm putting stuff together.
Second, I have textural elements.
Things that are gonna provide texture.
For this, I have a lot of smoke or fog,
maybe fire elements that I can use to cover muddy, obscure
and mask other things.
I'm looking for large frame pieces
that have a lot of runtime, so I can remix easily
just by sliding them along in time.
And in the case of smoke and fire,
I want a good variety of direction and density
so I can go larger, smaller, more movement, less movement,
lots of remix potential as I try these out
on the frames later, and third, I have contextual elements.
These may form the background plates
or other elements in the space.
They're gonna play alongside my main subjects.
Again, I'm looking for what can be isolated,
what can be stabilized,
what is gonna be easy to work with.
And granted, it can be hard
to make those evaluations right now.
But I hope after this tutorial,
you're in a good place to identify what techniques
you might deploy when you're working with footage yourself.
Now, as you can see, we need a heap of stuff
which is why having access
to a stock subscription service can be very handy
which is a perfect segue to talk
about this video sponsor, Storyblocks.
All the footage of this project came from Storyblocks.
So big, thanks to them for supporting this channel.
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For compositing, I wanna be able to choose
when and how something moves,
so I need to stabilize this stuff.
Have a look at these two rhinos.
I'm most interested in the time when they're standing still,
that's gonna be the simplest to make use of
in an uncomplicated frame,
but the camera is still moving around a bit.
Thankfully, we can simply use the Warp Stabilizer effect
to lock down the shot for some shots.
Just make sure you select no motion.
Then we'll see how it goes.
You may also want to turn on detailed analysis
and this works well here
because there's only one thing moving
and that's the camera relative to the environment,
so that's really easy for it to lock down.
But here's another example that won't be so smooth.
I want this shot of fire to be stabilized,
so it doesn't zoom in or out or move at all.
But the Warp Stabilizer has a lot of trouble
with all the various intricate movements happening.
The only things to grab onto here
are these plumes of fire and smoke,
and those are in constant motion.
So it's actually very confusing for this method.
This is when I would turn to my most favorite thing of all,
planar tracking.
So I'm going to fire up Mocha AE,
dropping the Mocha AE effect on a layer,
then inside of Mocha AE,
I select a patch of stable embers here
with an X spline by just clicking around.
We want to find a fairly stable texture to grab onto,
then I track forward and back.
And this could be more complicated for your shot,
if you wanna know more about Mocha tracking in general,
check out other videos on this channel,
but when I'm satisfied with the track
and it looks good and solid,
I hit save and I return to after effects.
Now I need to turn this data, that is the movement
of that patch of embers into stabilization.
And we do this by clicking the invert button here.
And then we pick which data set we wanna bring in,
which in this case it's layer one,
the only one that I've done, but just make sure,
and then we bring it in.
We choose transformed data down here.
We're going to apply this to the layer itself
and look how nice and stable this is.
Now we can use this element
to paint a nice, big sway of the fire
without any shifting around.
We still have a lot of interesting movement
happening within the frame.
Whenever I have elements like this, I wanna mask them out
so I can keep only the parts I'm interested in
in the final comp, no need to keep anything out
near the nasty edges that will betray
this is a piece of isolated footage so that I can go ahead
and build more complicated things with it.
Just remember that if the automatic solution fails,
we can go to a manual one,
to get better results from patches of predictable textures.
Now we move on to isolation.
We're gonna be using these clips in fairly stylized ways.
So our mats and masking doesn't need to be perfect
but it will help us if we're able to identify strategies
to be efficient in our isolation methods.
First, I wanna show you the extract effect.
Here's a shot of some hills that I've stabilized already
using the Warp Stabilizer.
Now, I don't want that pesky sky in there.
I only want the hills for this composition.
Rather than using a specific color key or Luma key,
I'm gonna use the extract effect, now why?
Well, because in this shot, the things I want to keep
and the things I want to leave
can be differentiated very simply on one color channel.
So I bring up the extract effect
and you can see this histogram up here right now.
It's graphing the luminance of the frame,
how bright and dark pixels are.
And you can see everything is kind of in one big pile.
If I change this to look at the blue channel,
we see two very distinct piles,
lots of pixels grouped in one island of values
and lots grouped in another.
Now that makes sense because of the three channels,
red, blue, and green, the sky is full of a lot of blue
and the ground is filled with a lot of green
and certainly not as much blue as the sky.
So by shifting this little bar
under the island we want to keep
and away from the island that we want to get rid of,
the sky becomes transparent.
By adjusting the bottom of the bar here, this angle,
we can change the softness and you can dial in those numbers
in manually if you'd like to.
If you're ever curious about if the extract effect
is gonna be helpful for you, I recommend you toggle
between the channels in your composition view.
If the thing you want to keep stands out
from the things you want to get rid of
using one of those channels, like you see a high contrast
between them, then it's a good bet,
you can use the extract effect to remove
or keep these things using these broad swathes
of the color channel
before you move on to other more granular methods.
But we are dealing with footage of nature
and surprise, surprise, lots of animals
like to blend in with their natural surroundings.
So you may run into issues
using effects level extraction techniques.
Luma key, not gonna be great, Chroma or color keys,
nope, probably not gonna be helpful either.
Sometimes you have to do some rotoscoping.
I've got videos on here
about specific manual and tracking assisted roto,
if you wanna get into those
but sometimes a quick and dirty rotobrush is good enough.
For this little family of rhinos,
I think we can roto them out well enough
since they're gonna be small in the final composition
and stylized enough that I can do kind of a bad job here.
I've stabilized this clip already.
So now I want to roto this already stabilized results.
It's a lot easier to do things that way.
So I will precompose
and then I will hold down option
and double-click on the comp
and that will open up the footage monitor.
So now I can doodle
on this precomposition with my rotobrush.
Then I just paint inside the parts that I wanna keep,
I hold Alt so the brush turns red
and I paint the parts that I wanna do away with,
and this pink line here is going to tell me
what I'm keeping, what I'm leaving.
Right now it doesn't look too exact,
but remember, we're doing a quick and dirty job here
because we'll be far enough away
that no one will notice our terrible, terrible crimes.
Depending on the complexity of your clip and the movement,
you may need to only paint a few frames.
This area with the arrow shows the span of the video
that after effects is going to try to roto for you.
And as you scrub ahead, the bar goes green,
as after effects does some work on each frame
based on the information you've given it previously
and how those pixels, those shapes have been moving.
If things get wild, you can do some touch-ups
and then the next frames could be better,
they could be more accurate.
So you may need to pause,
do some more brushing, let it keep going,
or you may need to cut a span short
and start all over again.
Times when limbs overlap into the body for example,
is often a trouble time.
So you may need to make multiple spans.
You may need to make different discrete spans in here.
But when you're happy,
you need to freeze this down,
after effects will then redo its calculations
and lock the things that you've done.
And then you can refine this at a gross level
in the effects controls.
So I'm gonna be feathering mine down
and I'll be playing with the contrast,
probably shifted the edge in quite a bit.
Definitely reducing the chatter quite a bunch.
If you wanna see how you're doing,
you wanna use these buttons down here, toggle alpha,
toggle alpha boundary and toggle alpha overlay.
You're gonna see how the mat is looking,
if you're satisfied, then your work is done.
In this clip specifically,
after I've rotoed pretty well with the brush,
I need the to ground these things.
So I made a duplicate
of that original precomp without any rotoing going on,
and as you can see, it has their legs in the grass,
that's the part that I wanted to keep,
and I'm just gonna put a very crude mask
with a feather on it, to remove the upper half.
For this comp, I just need a hard line of their backs
and horns to really pull them off the background.
You might run into this as well
when doing more abstract collage pieces.
The ground here is gonna blend out
but this hard line up at the top is what's important
to differentiate their silhouettes.
One more thing to think about
since we are talking about silhouettes,
what if we could just isolate something
without messing with its alpha at all?
In this specific case,
I wanted a big looming silhouette of a rhino.
So I've used the multiply blending mode
to have only the dark pixels impact the layers below it.
Multiply is great for shadows and silhouettes like this.
So that means I needed to up the luminance contrast
of this clip so that the sky is completely gone.
As you can see here,
I've used a couple of copies of the clip.
One of them, on top has been cropped down with the mask
to be only the top part that I've treated very harshly
with curves and levels to really blow that sky.
And then the layer below preserves the luminance nuance,
so the grass isn't totally contrasted out,
but I've tinted the clips to remove any color information.
Since again, all we want is that big looming shadow.
And then when I comp that in,
I might mask the clip even more to hone in on the subject,
feathering that mask out, just removing
all of the extraneous things that I don't need,
getting rid of that hard edge when we comp this in.
But as you can see, setting this to multiply
has now made this large shape in the space
without any need to extract or key
because what we wanted in the end
didn't require alpha separation
but this is enough stabilizing.
This is enough isolating.
We need to bring things together.
We need to make things move now.
Let me talk you through how some of these were assembled
because we are running long right now.
So this is gonna be a bit more of a cooking show.
Here's one I prepared earlier
and I'm gonna solo the layers as we get into the details.
I like to start any of the stuff by dropping in the subject,
kinda the main focus of the frame,
in this case, the big rhino silhouette,
and then the context or the background plate.
Here, that's being made with these three brushfire arcs,
one's flipped and rotated and they've been shifted in time.
I had enough length on the clip enough time
so that I could push one forward
and some back so that we don't really see
that these are just duplicates of the same clip.
It's kinda fakes a set a little bit
and gets us more use out of the same asset.
Now all of these are turned into 3D layers.
Don't get scared off now.
3D layers are our friends.
And really when I say 3D layers,
it's more like they're big panes of glass
that we're pushing away or pulling towards us.
I've also used a null here
to pair these three elements to it
so that I can move the one null layer
and control all three of them, that's as good organization.
But once I have these main elements
at a depth I'm happy with, it's time to bring in a camera
and start to dial in the motion I want.
In this case, it's a nice, slow dramatic push in.
I set to position key frames,
just changing the Z position.
And I'm applying a loop out continue expression on them.
You can add expressions by holding Alt
and clicking on the stopwatch
and then typing in these very special words.
But this expression means that after the last key frame,
the motion is gonna continue at the same speed,
and it maintains that velocity forever.
This lets me dial in the speed that I'm after
by simply pushing and pulling this key frame,
bringing it closer to make it faster, pulling it apart.
And with just these three elements,
I'm very quickly able to find the depth and speed
that I'm after for the shot overall,
it's not super cluttered.
Then it's a matter of putting in more elements
to add texture.
In this case, I have a few smoke layers in here,
both bright smoke that I've tinted
and put curves adjustment on
and I've got dark smoke that is just inverted
and tinted layers of some of the same elements.
So these four smoke layers
are just made up of two smoke clips
that I've inverted, shifted in time,
scaled and rotated around
to paint in with patches of light and dark.
The main thing that makes them work
as atmospheric elements
is that none of them are super harsh,
so they're blending in nicely.
We're using additive blending modes on the light smoke
and multiply blending modes on the dark ones,
lowering the opacity and hiding their edges off screen.
That way it feels seamless.
Otherwise you might wanna use really feathered masks
to control where the elements can be seen
and we've pushed them ahead and behind in Z space,
closer and further from the camera.
This is important when trying to have this volumetric feel,
the parallax caused by the elements
being apart from each other
is what sells the sense of depth and space.
It's the interaction between the elements
that really makes this work.
Finally, when you're happy with the speed, the movement,
the parallaxing, it's looking good on all those fronts,
you wanna do some harmonizing overall changes.
Using an adjustment layer over everything,
and effects like Tritone can really harmonize a piece
by harshly limiting the color palette.
Just make sure you roll it off a bit
and using the blend with original property
for more subtle clamping down and a curves adjustment
over everything can help get your colors in contrast.
Just so you'll find that I've actually got curves
on just about every element in here
so that I can tweak them all to taste.
So much of this is playing with the balance of light
and dark in the frame.
So getting in here and pushing those values around
is very helpful but be aware of your adjustment layers.
These things can disrupt the natural order
or at least the layer render order.
Sometimes this can be a life hack
but it can also be a point of pain and confusion.
So just be aware of what is above
and what is below your adjustment layer
as it can cause confusion to that layer order
versus 3D order when it comes to comps like this.
Oh, but Evan aren't you forgetting something?
These are titles, where's the text?
Good point.
Thanks for reminding me.
Texts may often be your final consideration
in treatments like this.
We did make sure to consider where in the comp
the text would live in that initial sketch.
For this text specifically,
I'm using a simple change of opacity using the ramp-up shape
for my text selector and pushing that change through
using the offset while growing,
expanding the range selector slightly.
At the same time, the opacity is changing at a layer level
to come on.
So we've got two forms of opacity change happening,
and over time the tracking is getting animated,
letters are getting pulled apart,
but if you want to know more about text animators
to dial in your treatment specifically,
I've many tutorials on that subject in this channel as well.
We could spend so much time on this one type of layer
and never cover it all.
I will suggest however, that if your frames are complex
that you keep your titles relatively simple.
Readability is the watch word with this kind of thing.
That's why these frames were designed
with these almost vacant patches
for the type to live in.
Leaving these spaces in your design from the beginning
and planning for them,
so they're not competing with other elements
of your composition will prevent readability issues,
so you'll never have to resort to a drop shadow again.
You know that alone has gotta be worth
watching this whole tutorial, right?
Well, that was a lot,
but I hope there was something in there that you can use
in your own projects.
If you have any questions about anything you saw,
anything I covered here
or maybe something I didn't cover here,
let me know in the comments.
Bring me your questions
and I'll try to answer them as best I can.
Should you make something cool with this knowledge,
I would love to see it, send it at ECAbrams on Twitch
or tag ECAbrams on Instagram.
I love to see what you get up to out there.
If you want more of this kind of thing,
make sure you subscribe and turn on notifications,
so you don't miss out on any new tutorials.
I've got new stuff going up here all the time.
And if you'd like more of this but live
and far less organized,
come on over to my live streams every weekend
over on (indistinct) and Twitch, ECAbrams over there too,
but that'll do it for me.
Thank you so much for watching and until next time,
stay creative and be kind to each other.
Bye for now.
(upbeat music)