[Music]
Now, this one has been on our list for quite a while.
But now it's time...
...let's fly like Harry Styles!
[Music]
Jordy here for cinecom.net! And welcome to Copy Cat Friday!
Now, today's video is sponsored by Videoblocks.
A library where you can download stock clips, video effects,
templates and a lot more.
One of the things you can get from their site are beautiful sunsets,
which we'll use as our background later in the video.
I could try out many of these different backgrounds
as my year subscription allows for unlimited downloads every day.
Get a 7-day trail for free by clicking in the first link
in the description below.
If you haven't seen Sign of the Times from Harry Styles yet, definitely do.
It's pretty impressive how they've made Harry fly.
They've actually attached him to a helicopter and removed the cable in post.
And that's why his flying looks so natural.
He's actually in that space. No visual effects nor green keying.
Unfortunately we couldn't arrange that helicopter,
but I do wanna try the same idea on a green screen.
The first thing that we need to do is figure out a way
to attach yourself securely to a cable.
We first tried to lay in a swing,
but the pose that I'm in does't look quite natural.
Just like Harry Styles, I needed a harness,
so that the cable can be attached on my back.
Yannick has a friend who does rock climbing and he let us borrow his climbing harness.
The rope needs to be attached somewhere above you.
We threw it over a beam in our studio.
You could also throw it over a branch, but make sure it's strong enough.
The harness is actually a pants, but
since I needed the cable to be attached on my back, I put it on like a shirt.
It wasn't too comfortable, but it worked.
Once everything sits in place,
make sure to test it out first and that everything is secure.
Next up is the green screen.
Make sure it's big enough so that you'll fit completely in the green area.
As for the lighting, make sure it's evenly distributed.
Since we had a lot of daylight coming through a dome,
we had a very soft overall lighting, which was perfect.
By the way, if you wanna learn all the nifty details
on how to setup and pull off the perfect green screen,
then make sure to click in the cards, up there.
And once that was setup, we focused on the lighting for the subject.
It's best that you know which background clips you'll be working with upfront.
We went for some sunset clips from Videoblocks,
so, to match the lighting of that, we placed a big tungsten light in the back.
And now we're ready to swing!
We did found out, though, that it wasn't so easy to get a natural flying pose.
I guess humans just aren't so natural with flying.
You kinda want to let yourself hang,
but at the same time trying to keep your balance in the air.
After a couple of shots, it's time to bring it into Premiere Pro.
First let’s remove the green.
Under Opacity I create a mask and draw inside the green screen.
Then I apply the Ultra Key effect to it to remove all the green.
If you wanna see an in-depth tutorial on how the Ultra Key works,
you can click in the cards again, up there.
Next up I position myself where I want to be.
But here comes the tricky part.
You kind of wanna blend in with the background to make it look realistic.
And the first thing you could do is color grading.
From the Lumetri panel I make myself darker,
add some more orange into the shot and under the creative tab,
increased the faded film to get rid of the harder contrasts.
Now, since I put myself in the far distance,
it's not so natural that I look too sharp.
So, I'll add a simple Gaussian blur and set the blurriness to something around 40.
So, that's going to help.
But it still might not look really natural
and that's because of the movement.
I think this is one of the trickiest things to do.
I also don't think that we got it all right,
but it basically comes down to adjusting a lot and trying to look for unnatural errors.
So, here's what we're going to do.
For the background, I'm going to set the scale to 200%.
And that allows me to move the position to one end,
create a keyframe and move the frame to the other end of the clip.
What we basically have now is a pan movement.
And I'll do the exact same thing with myself.
And after the keyframes have been placed, I click on the Motion property
which will reveal the path of the position animation.
To make it less static, I pull the levers on the start and stop keyframe.
That way I kinda float more.
You can also move your last keyframe a little higher in an arch, like this,
so that it seems like you're flying up.
However, this should be a conscious choice.
You can see that I'm also looking up, changing my arms and feet.
So, this pose would match with that I would suddenly
fly faster or higher.
And this is that part that I was talking about which is so hard to do.
You constantly wanna change your path, the speed of the animation, etc.
Now, if you are still having trouble like us to get it right,
there's actually a little trick.
Select the two clips, right click on it and say Nest.
We now have the two clips in a group
and on that group I will apply a fake camera movement.
I'm using the one from Jarle, which is actually a free preset
and I'll leave a link to his preset in the description below.
Since we have a camera movement now on both of the clips,
the individual movements are now a little bit covered up.
And we can do the same thing with the color grading.
If you had trouble matching the colors,
you could apply an overall grading to the group.
A last problem that I was running into,
was that the background had more noise because I scaled it up.
My clip had almost no digital noise because I was scaled down.
So, from the effects I searched for Noise and apply it also to the group.
Disable color noise and increase the amount a tiny bit.
So, that was it for blending ourselves into a stock clip from Videoblocks.
Lastly we need to remove the wire that is coming out from behind us.
If you have a thin wire, you can actually use the effect called Simple Wire Removal
inside After Effects.
But if your head is moving around too much and the cable is too thick,
we'll need to manually mask that out.
You can do that inside Premiere Pro, but it's not so user-friendly.
I would really suggest you to use After Effects for this.
I'm working on the source clip and have a mask around the cable.
With the animation enabled for that mask, I adjust every frame.
A lot of work and afterwards
we knew that we just should have wrapped the cable with a green cloth,
so that we could use the Ultra Key on that as well.
Looking back on it, a helicopter might have been easier.
But, you know what? We where very creative.
And that's the most important thing with whatever you do.
Stay creative, guys!
-We got to, we got to get away!
Get away!