-Okay, so it's 8:45 right now, I arrived at the office,
but I still don't have the key.
-Let’s get to work, Lorenzo!
-Let’s go!
[Cinecom’s intro music]
♪Yo what's up, my name is Jordy from cinecom.net,
and you’re watching Copy Cat Friday.♪
♪In this series we recreate and break down
certain effects from famous films and music videos.♪
But today we are having a look at Venom, the latest music video from Eminem.♪
♪And see how we can recreate that face distortion effect.♪
♪So, let’s get into it!♪
[Rap music]
Yeah, I'm glad I got rid of that!
And so is Yannick, who’s currently editing upstairs.
No idea where Lorenzo is at, though.
Anyways, I'm glad to be back in the studio.
And I want to start off by thanking Storyblocks, our channel sponsor.
Storyblocks is a huge library where you can find tons of stock footage,
After Effects templates, video effects transitions and so much more.
The cool thing is that you only have to pay a single price per year,
and with that you can download unlimited video assets from their growing library.
Definitely make sure to check it out, as well.
You can do so by following the first link in the description below.
The first scene is not important for the effect,
but I do want to show you guys how we recreated that same setup,
as with the Eminem clip.
First of all, we've got a strong backlight in the back, obviously,
which is the Aputure 120 D with a Fresnel lens onto it.
And then on top of me we've got a 120 D softbox.
And, because it's on top of me,
we kind of get these hard shadows here underneath my eyes, which is pretty cool.
Then on the back we've got a smoke machine.
This right here is a very cheap smoke machine, I thought it was around 20 bucks.
It works, but it creates this very puffy smoke cloud.
So, what you wanna do is grab anything
and wave with it to break those fluffy clouds
and create more of a mist kind of smoke.
Filming everything is not that hard, what you basically want to have
is just kind of a twitch with your head and that's it.
So, you wanna write down whether you took a side shot, a frontal shot,
how high that camera is, etcetera.
Once you've got that, take it back to your studio.
The backlight now should be off and we’re only going to work with the top lighting,
right here, which is the Aputure 120 D with the softbox onto it.
You don't need this lights right here.
what we're trying to achieve is a very ugly lighting,
where we have hard shadows underneath your eyes so that it kind of looks scary.
So, if you have a normal lighting in your house,
then you can also just stand underneath that, basically is the same thing.
what is important though is that you're going to work with a completely dark background.
Our walls are black, so that is great.
If you don't have black walls, try to work with some black fabric.
We’ve got something right here.
Just hang that up in the background, that’s it.
Or you can also use black wrap right here.
This stuff is actually aluminum foil painted black.
But it is heat resistant and you can wrap that around your lights,
and that way your lights won't shine onto the walls
and only on you.
your subject should be illuminated but not the background.
Let’s do that, let's close the dome, let’s turn off the lights
and shoot in the black.
In the dark.
That's much better!
Now, what you want to do to make it yourself as easy as possible,
is film from a tripod.
Just put your camera on here and keep your head as still as possible
while you just stand underneath that light.
If you like so, you can make some scary faces as well.
But important is that you're going to match the perspective of your camera shots
right in here in this studio environment,
with the shots that you took outside.
So, those are the shots that you need,
now let’s grab your editing machine and fire up Premiere Pro!
We're gonna start by working on the dark clips.
Look for the shot that has the same angle as the clip you want to get the effect on.
Drag that one to your timeline.
With the clip select, head over to the Opacity property and click on the Pen tool.
You wanna draw a rough mask around the face.
And since you should be standing still,
we don't need to animate that mask to follow the head.
Then go into the mask properties and increase the feather.
Your blacks should be absolute black.
If that is not the case, then open up Lumetri
and decrease the blacks value, or maybe the shadows as well.
Next up we're going to animate my face onto Yannick.
But because there's an issue in Premiere with masks and effects,
we're gonna have to nest it first.
Right click on that clip and choose Nest.
Move that nested sequence up one track,
because underneath, we're gonna place the normal shot.
We're gonna create different layers,
which combined will have the right distortion effect.
And the first layer is just gonna follow Yannick's movement.
From my Effects Library, I'm gonna search for the Transform effect
and add that to the nested sequence.
I'm gonna use that effect to scale down and reposition my face over Yannick’s.
Then enable the animation for the position and re-adjust it overtime.
It doesn't have to be perfect,
but it does kinda need to follow Yannick's face movement.
If your subject also moved his head up and down, then animate the rotation property as
well.
You can kinda see this as a face swap.
Now, the reason that we're animating it through this effect
is so that we can disable to use the composition’s shutter angle
and set one of our own, such as 270°
to get some great motion blur into that animation,
making it appear more like a ghost.
And finally is the blending, which is not right yet.
So change that to Screen, under the opacity property.
And that'll be your first layer.
Now hold down your alt key and drag the nested sequence to the layer above,
to make a duplication of it.
This duplication is going to get a little different animation.
And since we've already duplicated the previous animation,
where the face follows your subject,
the only thing that we're gonna do now is go back into the Transform effect
and pull the face a little bit forward here and there.
Because of that previous animation,
the face will bounce right back to its first position,
and this way you're getting this jumpy glitch effect.
And then finally the third layer.
For this I'm gonna duplicate the top layer, and with it selected
press Alt+arrow to the right.
This will nudge the clip and you can do this for about two or three frames.
With this offset we can kinda see it as another different animation.
As for that layer, I'm also gonna change the blending mode to Lighter Color.
And add a Gaussian blur effect to it, as well.
Make sure that this sits above the Transform effect, though.
Increase it to around 15.
It could be that your effect already looks like perfect.
If your face distortions, however, are not bright or too present enough,
then use Lumetri on any or all three of the layers to change their exposure.
And as a final touch, I'm gonna give a cross dissolve
to the ending of the face clips to make them fade out.
You can keep this short.
[Rap music fades in]
Now, I've got no idea why I'm actually holding this laptop,
it doesn't even have a battery inside.
Yannick is doing all of the screen cuts, I'm doing nothing on this laptop.
Anyways, thank you guys so much for watching,
I hope that you've learned something new.
Thank you Storyblocks for the support, as well.
But most importantly…
Stay Creative!
…you name it, my name is, no, you name it!
Yo, Ha ha ha!
No idea why I'm jumping off a ladder, but it just sounded cool in my head,
so, let's do this.
Yo, what's up guys!