This video is brought to you by Storyblocks Video.
Hey!
Who took my cookies?
Yannick!
Lorenzo!
Gilles!
Get down here, guys.
What's wrong, Jordy?
Yannick, did you take my last cookie?
No, I don't like chocolate so I didn't take your cookie, Jordy.
Okay, I believe you.
And you, Lorenzo, did you take my last cookie?
No, Jordy, I hate cookies.
All right, I believe you, too
And you, Gilles, did you take my last cookie?
No, Jordy.
Now that I don't believe.
Lasso of Truth!
Sometimes I go to public places and dress myself as a pigeon just because I like birds.
No, Gilles, the question was if you took my last cookie.
Damn, you're weird.
Yeah, you want it?
Okay, I know Jordy likes cookies, but would he really eat that cookie?
Hmm. It's like dripping with weird Gilles-saliva.
Welcome.
I'm Yannick and let me take you on this wondrous ride we call CopyCat Friday.
And today we are recreating an effect from one of the first female superheroes, Wonder Woman.
They just released a trailer for her latest movie where you can see her kicking some ass.
However, recreating some ass-kicking would be hard.
That's why we are going to show you how you can create the Lasso of Truth effect.
Now, speaking about truth, did you know that the creator of Wonder Woman
was also the inventor of the lie detector?
Well, he did and his name was William Martson.
This is probably also the reason why Wonder Woman's lasso has the ability to make people tell the truth.
Now, what do you need for this effect?
Well, a green rope which you can buy or make yourself with some green tape
and, most importantly, the free saber plug-in from Video Copilot.
I'll leave a link for that in the description below.
Of course, you are also going to need a shot to work on.
The one thing to keep in mind when making your shot is the shutter speed.
Increase this a lot so that the motion blur is at its minimum.
This will help you with keying out the green rope.
Now let's head over to After Effects where we can start with the post-production.
The first step you can make is duplicating your shot two times.
You can give them names such as 'Original Rope' and 'Rope Matte.'
This will make the workflow a lot easier.
Then search for the 'Keylight' effect and drag that to the rope matte layer.
Select your green color and fine-tune if necessary.
And, believe me, it will be.
Just put the view on 'Combined Matte' and adjust the Clip Black and the Clip White until you have a clean key.
When this is done, go to the 'Track Matte' options of the rope layer and set this to 'Alpha Inverted Matte.'
Now instead of having a hole in your clip, the Track Matte will leave you with only the green rope.
Exactly what we need.
The next step is to pre-comp the Rope and the Rope Matte.
Of course, choose move all attributes into a new composition and give the layer a name.
Okay, now you will have two layers; your original one and the cut out rope.
Next, search for the 'Fill' effect and drag that to your rope layer.
You can keep the standard setting.
We just need the fill effect to make the rope extra recognizable for the next step in After Effects.
And this one is the most important step of the entire video: making the mask with the Sabre plugin on.
Normally, when you want to use the Sabre plugin, you need to animate your mask frame by frame manually.
However, we found a way to avoid this tedious animating.
Select the rope clip and head over to the Layer menu on top.
Then, on the bottom of the drop down menu, select the Auto-trace option.
This option will automatically create a mask on the layer's outlines.
Keep the standard settings and click on OK.
Let the Auto-trace do its thing and, after it's done, you will normally have a few masks that define your rope.
Now, because the Auto-trace tool isn't perfect, we have to skim through our shots to look for flaws.
The first flaw you can solve is the leading extra and needless masks.
Just select and delete them.
The second flaw we have is the fact that a few frames aren't outlined by the masks.
So this means we have to draw them ourselves.
Select the 'Rope' layer and take the 'Pen' tool.
Now create a mask that roughly outlines the green rope.
After this, enable the animation for the Mask Path
and let the mask move out of the frame on the moment the Auto-trace Matte takes over again.
Also, don't forget to move your own drawn mask out of the frame
before the moment the Auto-trace masks didn't work.
Otherwise, you will have multiple glowing ropes which isn't really what we want.
Yeah, nobody wants that.
It's like Storyblocks Video.
I mean, who wants that?
There's no use with Storyblocks.
I use Storyblocks Video everyday.
Crap, the app is just so useful, okay?
They have hundreds of thousands of 4k studio-quality stock clips.
They have After Effects templates, thousands of backgrounds, and all different kinds of themes.
There are overlay effects.
There are transitions and so much more.
And the incredible thing, guys, is that there's only a single price per year which is super cheap.
And with that, you can download as much video assets as you want.
That's right.
We all have Storyblocks Video here in the office. It's super cool and, yeah, we use it almost on a daily basis.
So make sure to check it out, guys.
You can get Storyblocks, as well, by clicking the first link in the description below.
Now back to you, Yannick.
Okay.
Now it's time to add the Sabre plugin to your rope.
Drag it from the Effects library through the layer and change the blending mode to 'Add.'
The next thing you can do now is change the Core Type to 'Layer Masks.'
This will use the masks as a path for the Sabre effects.
Then play around with the settings until you have the effect that you want.
I increased the Glow Spread, Core Size, and Core Softness, but I also decreased the Glow Bias.
And, of course, change the color from blue to orange.
And, look, we already have this cool glowing Lasso of Truth.
Super simple, no?
However, we can still add some extra details.
And the first one that I want to add is motion blur
because we have none due to the high shutter speed.
To reintroduce motion blur, just duplicate a rope layer.
Again, pre-comp that layer and change the blending mode to 'Add.'
Now drag the 'Force Motion Blur' to the new pre-comp layer, and in the Effects controls,
set the Motion Blur Samples to around 20.
The only thing left now is to set the Opacity to around 30 and maybe even animate Opacity
so that the motion blur comes in when you really whip the lasso.
Now the last detail is some extra glow.
Create an orange solid layer and place that on top of everything.
Create an ellipse mask on the solid layer and feather it a whole bunch.
Also, lower the Opacity to around 20. Change the blending mode to 'Add'
and animate the mask so that that follows along with the lasso.
And that was really it for this cool effect.
What are you doing, Lorenzo?
Nothing.
Lorenzo..
Okay. Okay.
I was making a website using Squarespace and they're giving a 10% discount and I couldn't resist.
Sorry.
Oh, yeah, that's pretty cool. I use Squarespace too. It's awesome.
Okay, guys, the video is almost done.
However, I still want to do my Yannick's Fun Fact Fountain.
Personally, I find Wonder Woman quite cool with all her superpowers.
She's even worthy of wielding Thor's hammer.
How awesome is that?
And you can't deny that she has been a role model for many young girls.
Heck, she even helped with breaking the typical housewife stereotype.
But what I do find strange is her weakness, which is being tied up by a man.
This would make her completely powerless.
However, it would only work if a man would bind her.
Not a woman.
A man.
Sounds a little bit like bondage to me.
Okay, let's wrap up this CopyCat Friday.
Thank you so much for watching.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Thank you Storyblocks Video for the support, and like always, stay creative.
Who can guess the song that I just whistled?
Ten points if you gave the right answer in the comments.