Hey guys, today, Justin Barrett from Clever Tagline is going to be showing you how to
create animated lines inside of HitFilm Pro and Express, this effect doesn’t require
any add-ons so I’ll let Justin take it away.
Welcome back, all you clever people! Justin here with Clever Tagline…tagline…line…you
know, that reminds me of a request that came in to the HitFilm crew. People have been asking
how to create animated lines in HitFilm, kinda like the ones you’re seeing here. I was
all set to give you my favorite recipe for deep-fried cicadas, but…but you know what?
Let’s…let's scrap all that! Let’s…let's give the people what they really want, and
spend some time in HitFilm talking about the many ways you can make animated lines. And
better still, let’s give you so much stuff that it takes two weeks to cover it all! What
do you say? I’m gonna guess you’re all screaming “Yeah, buddy!”, so…*ahem*...let’s
get started.
One of the core techniques we’re going to use is based on a tip shared by Jay Haynes
of the Film Sensei YouTube channel, and Jay has kindly allowed me to share the process
here.
Start by making a new composite shot, adding a black plane, then dropping the Lightsword
(2-point Auto) effect onto the plane. In the effect, drop the Inner Glow width to zero,
then open the Core category, set the Color to white, Feather to zero, and Stability to
100. Set the Hilt and Tip position values to zero on both axes, with the tip width also
set to zero (you’ll see why in a minute) then twirl open Auto Scale Persistence and
uncheck Auto Scale. Set Motion Persistence to 3x for now, Distortion to zero, and Blend
to None. Next add a point layer and name it “Drawing Point.” Back in the lightsword
effect, set both the Hilt and Tip controls to take their position from this point.
I’ll set some keyframes on the point layer, and we now have a line that draws through
the frame, and erases itself shortly after. To control how long the line sticks around,
adjust the value on the Motion Persistence property. For example, my earlier setting
of 3x means that you can draw for three frames before the line begins to erase itself. If
you want the line to stay a really long time, crank this value up really high, though be
aware that large values will begin to introduce some lag in the timeline's responsiveness.
Looking at the opening shot of the band, the line following the woman’s arm swing toward
the end of the shot was done using this exact setup. In this case, the motion persistence
value was set to 5x, and the point driving the line was manually keyframed to follow
her hand. To prevent the line from being seen too soon, I adjusted the active range of the
plane layer containing the line effect.
You can also sculpt exactly how the line will be shaped. With the Show Motion Path option
active for the viewer, select your drawing point layer, and you’ll see a collection
of tiny squares, each one representing a keyframe on the selected layer. If you select one of
those squares, or select a keyframe marker in the timeline, handles will appear that
you can use to tweak the movement of the layer through that point, which in turn determines
the shape of the drawn line.
To break things up a little more, set some keyframes on the Hilt width property over
time, as I did in this example, which will vary the width of the drawn line. Because
the hilt and tip are overlapped, there’s no need to mess with both of their values,
which is why it’s okay to leave the tip width at zero.
Something else I did for this example piece (but not for the shots with the band) was
to give the line some random jitter. This can create the impression that each frame
was drawn freehand, making the effect feel more organic. To do this, add a plane layer
to the composite shot where your line is being drawn. Onto that plane, add the Fractal Noise
effect. The only thing I did with this effect was keyframe its Seed property to go from
zero to a really large number by the end of the shot. The number itself isn’t terribly
important, but it does need to be large to ensure that there’s a strong change between
frames. With this done, hide the plane, add a grade layer above it, then add the Displacement
effect to the plane layer containing the line. Set the source to the grade layer, the Horizontal
and Vertical Displacement options to Luminance, and then increase the displacement amounts
until you’re happy with how it looks. In my earlier example, I chose 25 pixels for
both. If you plan to use this displacement option a lot, I suggest moving the fractal
noise plane into its own composite shot, making sure to move the effect with it. Now you can
drop that fractal noise comp into any comp that needs displacement, and you won’t need
the grade layer because you can directly target that comp with the Displacement effect.
Because we’re going to use this modified lightsword effect a lot in this series, I
recommend saving it as a preset. To do so, select the effect, right-click on it, choose
“Create Preset,” then give it a name and tell HitFilm where to save it. I made one
earlier called “Line Drawing” and put it in the 2D Effects folder.
Now let’s look at how to take this technique up a notch. Before we do that, though, I want
to make the list of elements in my Media tab a little more condensed. To do that, I’m
going to change from Preview Mode to List Mode. With that done, let’s start in the
Accents folder, which contains the smaller accents mostly used in the opening and closing
shots.
I knew these accents would be used a lot, so I built each one in its own composite shot,
and made them fairly large so they’d work at various sizes, as you can see with the
straight line accent. In this case, there are three lightsword line drawing effects
on a single plane, all set up like I showed earlier, with each one controlled by a different
point layer. I also animated the line thickness over time, though in this case I set keyframes
on the core width property of each effect. Whether you do this or keyframe the hilt width,
the end result is pretty much the same.
The wavy lines coming from the guitar player were made in the same way, though instead
of keyframing the vertical motion directly on the three drawing-point layers, I using
a parent point layer to move the three drawing points up and down.
For the bass player, I wanted to create some radiating lines as he plucked the strings,
so I set aside the lightsword for a moment and went with a different approach. I began
with a new composite shot, dropped my plane into it, used the Fill Color effect to make
it white, and scaled it to create a horizontal bar. Above that I added a grade layer, onto
which I dropped the Polar Warp effect, which turned the bar into a circular band. I then
reduced the Polar Warp's Range property to 45 to turn the band into a partial arc, and
animated the bar moving upwards from the bottom of the frame over fifteen frames, using a
Manual Bezier keyframe at its highest position to ease it into place.
I then dropped this comp into a new comp, added my black plane below it, and a grade
layer above it. On the grade layer I first added the Posterize effect, setting Smooth
Source to 35, Colors Per Channel to 2, and Smooth to .09, which rounded off the hard
edges of the arc. Then I added the Echo effect, setting Echo Time to -.08, Number of Echoes
to 2, and Decay to .57, which created a couple faded echoes shortly behind the original.
With the accents finished, I pre-rendered all three, and then it was time to sync them
with the video. Because the camera tilts up at the beginning of the shot, I wanted the
accents to track with the camera movement. To do this, I used HitFilm’s 2D tracking
to track the microphone in the center of the frame, and applied the track to a point layer
named “Track Point." To learn more about tracking in HitFilm, click the card in the
upper-right corner.
I started by syncing the straight line accent to the woman’s finger snaps. After finding
a frame where a snap begins, I dropped the accent on timeline on the proper frame, set
its blend mode to Add, then moved, rotated, and scaled it into place. I then parented
this accent layer to the Track Point so that it would follow the camera movement. For the
next accent, I duplicated the first one, then tweaked its timing, position, and rotation
to match the next finger snap. This process was repeated for the final snap, and then
I began syncing the accents for each of the other musicians, following the same basic
process.
As a final touch to help ground these accents in the scene a little more, I chose to have
other scene elements obscure them, like the moment in the final shot when the guitar player
walks in front of the bass player. This was done by creating a mask on the accent layer
to represent the obscuring shape, clicking this icon to invert the mask, activating keyframes
on the mask’s Position, Rotation and Path properties, and animating the mask over time.
Now let’s move on the animated notes. Like the other accents, each note was made in its
own composite shot, and created fairly large. Looking at the half note as an example, I’ve
got the custom line drawing effect on a plane, this time with Motion Persistence set to 50x
to ensure that the note stays around long enough. To get the shape the way I wanted
it, I used the technique I mentioned earlier to sculpt the point’s motion using the on-screen
handles available for each keyframe. For the quarter and eighth notes, I also added a second
plane layer that had the Fill Color effect to make it white, and a mask to create the
filled center of the note. To expand this center shape, I set keyframes on the Expansion
property for the mask.
Adding the notes to the first and last shots was done similar to adding the other accents,
along with setting scale property keyframes after adding them so they scale up as they're
being drawn. I also wanted them to drift up and out of frame in a wavy fashion. To achieve
this, I set two position keyframes on each note — one where the note starts, and another
40 frames later with the note outside the frame, straight above the first — with the
first keyframe set to Manual Bezier, so the upward movement has some acceleration. Once
all of the notes for a given shot were roughly animated like this, I selected all of the
note layers, right-clicked, and chose “Make Composite Shot.” Inside that nested composite
shot, I added a grade layer above the notes, then added the Waves effect to this grade.
I set Amplitude to 6, Frequency to 4, and Angle to 180. Now as the notes drift up, they
move through the wave.
The final piece we’ll look at in part 1 is the collection of animated lines radiating
across the guitar strings in the third shot. This also uses the lightsword effect, though
not the way we’ve been using it so far. In this case, I only turned off the glow,
set the core color to white, the hilt and tip width to 10 pixels, and the Blend to None.
If I turn off the Set Matte effect on this layer, you can see there are six lines matching
the six guitar strings. Each one is a separate lightsword effect, and each one has been hand-tracked
to match the strings. That’s the tricky part, but because I knew I’d only be showing
the lines for brief moments as the guitarist strummed the strings, I was able to speed
up the process just a little.
Once I had the lines tracked, it was time to make what would become a matte source for
these lines. I made a new composite shot with dimensions set to 2048 by 2048, and the time
set to match my other comp length. In this composite shot I made a new plane with dimensions
of 2048 by 150, then added the Color Gradient effect to it, setting Blend to Normal, Opacity
to 100%, and the Start and End Point properties set with both X values at zero, the Y Start
at -75, and the Y End at 75, which made the gradient exactly fill the plane. Next I rotated
the plane 45 degrees, and set its Anchor point to 75 on the Y axis. To turn this into a diamond,
I added a grade layer at the top of the stack, and two Reflection effects to this grade,
with the Angle on the first one set to 90, and the second one set to -180.
I then copied the video from the other composite shot, pasted it into this one, and used that
as reference for animating the plane each time the player strummed the strings. I set
the first keyframe with the plane at the center of the frame, the second one eleven frames
later with the plane a little more than halfway to the upper-right corner, then set the keyframes
to Manual Bezier and pulled the handles in slightly. I then copied and pasted these position
keyframes to match the timing of the other strumming motions. I also decided that I wanted
the gradient to be wider near the center, and more narrow at its widest point, so I
added scale keyframes to the plane.
Back in my main composite shot, I added this comp at the bottom of the stack and turned
off its visibility. On the plane containing the lines, I added the Set Matte effect, setting
the source to my Radiating Diamond composite shot, Matte Source to Luminance, Blend to
Subtract, and Invert checked. I then positioned, rotated, and scaled the diamond comp to match
the first strum, with the comp’s center roughly in the center of the guitar’s sound
hole. I then activated keyframes for position and rotation, and roughly tracked the layer
to follow the guitar as it moved, again focusing on those few frames when the radiating diamond
made the string lines visible.
To have the guitarist’s hand obscure these lines as he strummed, I began by dropping
in another copy of my full plane, placing it below the video footage. I then added a
very rough mask loosely matching the shape of the hand, set its Feather property to 10
pixels to soften the edge a bit, and inverted the mask. I placed a grade layer above it,
then opened each of the lightsword effects and chose this grade layer as the mask source
under the Core property category. This meant that each line used that mask to cut out the
space where the hand was, while the Set Matte effect drove the visibility of the lines as
an entire group. I then keyframed that mask over the course of the shot to match the hand
at the key points when it obscured the moving lines.
That’s where we’ll wrap things up for part one of this series. Keep your eyes peeled
for part two to see how the other line effects were created, including a technique for rotoscoping
that works in both HitFilm Pro and Express.
Until next time, Clever Tagline.
If you liked this tutorial be sure to subscribe for part 2 coming later this month. Leave
any questions down below and thanks for watching.