Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Jake, and
this class will teach you how to create
a Fire portal reveal, which is great for beginners
and experienced VFX artists. You don't need any
experience working with Adobe After effects
to learn this effect. You can even download
the free trial version, and it will work fine. I'll explain each step we will take to create this VFX shot. I'll provide you with
all required knowledge so you can film your footage. Understand each
setting to adjust this effect so it looks
exactly as you want. Also, I'll provide this
ASM V effects fire reveal, so you could use it to
complete this class. You can always write your
questions under any of my classes to get help from me while creating cool effects. I'm excited to see your projects after completing this class. I think it's the
best way to learn the software while creating
interesting effects for fun. And to complete this class, our goal is to create
this Fire portal reveal. I'll be happy to see
it in my class as also your result after
following all the steps. So, let's get started.
2. VFX Fire Compositing: Okay, so I'm using Adobe
After Effects 2025, but you can pretty much use any version of Adobe
After effects. It will work fine. Even free trial version
will work fine. As you can see, I'm
using standard layout. So if you click here, you'll see the semiloPanel, which you can see on my screen. If you for some
reason cannot see some of the panels which
you can see on my screen, you can easily go
to Window here. Leftmost click and
choose right here. For example, character panel, as you can see, we can
enable it or just close it. So from this Window panel, you can choose wherever
panel which you can see on my screen and
enable it right here. So for this effect, we need
to import our footage. Let's go to File, Import, file. All this footage will be available in resource
step to this class, so just simply select
it and click Import. So let's take a look
what we have here. You can just simply select it, hold left most click
and drag it here on new composition or here on timeline to create
new composition. As you can see, we
created new composition with this icon here as well, and it has the same
name as our video. Basically, you need
to shoot video like just use the same video which I provided to this class. But in case if you would want
to shoot your own video, you need to make
sure that your light in your scene doesn't change. Use tripod or just set your
phone or camera on a shelf, so it would be a steady shot so you can see camera
doesn't move at all, and just make sure that
lighting will not change because it may mess
up a bit our effect. Then you can ask someone
to shine a light on your face and then body
like this just for reveal. You don't need to have
some fancy lights. You can just use simple
flashlight on your phone. But to more dramatic effect, you might need to have a dark room because
at bright daylight, the light from your phone
could be not enough. You can film outside at evening. It would be even easier to light your face
with a flashlight. So basically, you need to
light up your face and then a bit your body to
have this light reveal. And then you act like you
just appeared in the scene. Once you've done your pose, you just need to leave
this shot just like this. I just walked away,
so we would have the screen plate because
from this moment, we will start our video. So as you can see, it's
basically a background. Just make sure to not
move your camera. So basically, you can just film your reveal and then
walk out of the frame. Okay, so now when I have this moment where I don't have anything at about 10 seconds, we can just simply
split the layer. Let's go to edit, split
layer or Control Shift D. We can just left most lick and hold
and jrag to the left. So this video will start from this clean plate where
we don't have anything, and let's jrag this video
below on top and we can press Enter on keyboard
and rename it like myself. So we would know that
this layer is myself, and this we can also press Enter and rename it BG for background. And let's just move
this top layer away, so we will have this
fire reveal and later we will have ourselves
appearing in the shot. So for now, we want to
focus on our background because we need to composite
here our fire reveal. So basically, we have a bunch of videos which we want to use. We can expand it here a
bit to see the full name. Let's just leftmost double click on main fire reveal
to see itself. So as you can see, we
have really nice fire reveal with the smoke
and everything. You even have these cool
looking reflections. So it's a good idea to film your footage where the
floor is similar to this, because it will look
a lot more realistic. Solids, just simply
left most lick and drag here in
this composition. And as you see, we don't have this transparency
which we want to have to see this fire on
top of our background. For this, I have
included this mat layer, which basically if we will
leftmost double clicking it, we will see that it's
exactly the same, just the brightness value. And this is exactly what we want because we now can simply just take it and drag in drop above this
main fire reveal. And here we can set MT
to this layer on top. So we can just set to
this second layer. It's just like this.
Now it's trying to mat using Alpha channel,
but in our case, we need to left
mostly on this icon, so we would use only
brightness from this video. And let's click here. If you have a older version
of adobeafor effects, you might need to change
here to luma matte. But if you have
the newer version, you can just simply
select this layer above and then just left mostly
here to change to Luma mat. As you can see now
we have our effect cut out and it
looks pretty good. But as you can see, it would look a lot better in darker in. So this is why we will need
to make a few adjustments, so it will work even in
bright scene like this. And first easy step which
you can do is to select this main fire and go to
mode and change to lighten. Just left most lick and
then choose lighten. As you can see, now we
have only the color, and we've cut it out our
smoke and everything. This is a pretty cool mode
because in this case, we don't even need to
use this luma mat. But I wanted to show you in
case if you would want to preserve that smoke for
your other projects. But for this effect, we will
change to lighten because our scene is pretty light and
we will make some changes. So this fire will work
great even in this scene. What we want to do is to change the brightness of our scene. So for this, we want to apply some effects for
this background. So select this background and
go to effects and presets. If you cannot see this
effects and presets panel, you can go to Window effects and presets and enable it here. Wait for it to load up and
then just type here exposure. Here under color correction, you can choose exposure, left most lick in it and
jagono here on our background. So let's say about here at 12 frames,
as you can see here, before this fireball
appears in our shot, we can just create a
keyframes for our exposure. So let's left mostly on the stopwatch to
create a keyframe. Let's press on keyboard
to see our keyframe. So just press, as you can see, I'm pressing you and it will reveal any keyframes
which we have on layers. So what is keyframe? Keyframe is basically
a point in time, which remembers the value
of certain property. In our case, this keyframe
remembers this point in time, which is 12 frames, and it remembers this value
of property exposure. So for example, if I'm going
to move few frames later, just like this and
change this value, it will create another keyframe. Let's make a lot of
change like this. And as you can see,
it got a bit darker. So basically, now
with this keyframe, it remembered at this
point in time, this value. And if I'm going to
jump to this keyframe, you can see that it
remembered our zero value. So now, W after effects will try to go from one
keyframe to next one. So first one was a zero, and then it goes through time, as you can see, to
this second value which we've set,
and we can change. Make sure that you are
changing your value on top of the keyframes because you can accidentally create
another keyframe which you don't want. To be sure that you are on top of the keyframe
with this time cursor, you can just simply hold shift, and it will snap to this. And second que is this little
icon will light up blue. As you can see if I'm not
on top of the keyframe, it stay gray, and if I'm on top of the keyframe,
it lights up blue. So once you are on
top of the keyframe, you can just simply change
to any value which you want. In our case, we actually
want two exposure effects. So let's add another one because with this
first exposure effect, we will add some flicker,
and with the second one, we just will bring down the brightness of
our scene in total. So let's go to this first
keyframe and let's create a keyframe to this exposure
and to this gamma correction. Because with combinations
of these two values, we will get more
control over how we want to turn our brightness
down in this scene. Once again, we can just select this background layer and press on keyboard and once again
to see all of the keyframes. And also you can see we
have our older keyframes and new keyframes
for second exposure. So let's jump to about 24 frames where our
fireball is already in shot, and let's crank up the
exposure a little bit for our contrast and decrease
our gamma correction. Let's set it pretty low, maybe even 0.14, so you can see it's
much lower than it was. And with this exposure, you can change it here or
here, it doesn't matter. So let's change
here to maybe 0.42. So now as you can see we got really dark scene and
with this exposure, we will add some
flicker, just like this. So let's delete these keyframes. We can just simply click here to delete key frames as you
can see the removed here. Let's reset this first effect. We can just simply set
this to zero to reset it. So we will focus only on
our darkening of the scene. As you can see with this
darkening of the scene, we are getting a bit of smoke and our fire is a
lot more visible. So this is why we would want
to use the second exposure. And second thing
you could see that this scene got really vibrant. So let's go to effects
and presets and type here tint and other color correction, select this tint
and drop it here. And let's make sure that
here at the beginning, we will set this amount to zero. Later here, we want to change
this value a bit higher. Basically, we want to desaturate this scene a bit because
now it's too saturated. And if I'm going to
set about to 40, we just removing some of the colors so it will stay
a bit more consistent. As you can see, now
it looks much better. And now we can actually
play around with this first exposure
to add some flicker. Why we want to add some flicker? Because we have
some bright spots in this fire like this and this, and then it disappears from
here and appears here. Basically a fire moves, and if you would imagine the dark room and
the light candle, you can see that
even slides move of the fire will change the
brightness of your room. So we want to mimic
this kind of effect. So about here, we can set it to zero and
create a keyframe, then here we can just drop it
down because at this point, we want to mimic, like we got something really
bright in our scene. So let's make sure that
it goes really dark here. Just like this. And then we're simulating, our camera adjusts and tries
to keep up with the fire. And a bit later, let's
change it a bit darker, then a bit brighter, then a bit darker again. A few frames, skip a
few frames and a bit lighter and let's
go darker here, here, a bit brighter, and maybe let's
move this ski frame and make a bit darker here. And here where we have this
violent two explosions. Let's make it a lot brighter. So it would look
like this explosion lets up the scene and then goes a bit darker a bit
brighter, once again, darker. And we can finally
reset it to zero. So now we can just simply resize the scene by
clicking here on this icon and left most click
on this work area handle. Let's cut it to 9
seconds, just like this. And you can just write
most click on it and click Trim
Comp to Work area. So basically, we would
see only our scene. And now we can just simply press zero numpad to see
what we've got. So now as you can see, we've got this really nice
flashing effects. It really represents
this violent movement in the fire in our shot. So let's press zero nupt
to see how it looks. And here where our
fire disappears, we can actually just take
all of these keyframes. We can even press you on keyboard once again
to see all of these six keyframes and select it left mostly and hold and drag to
select all of them, then press Control C to copy and then set your time
cursor here at the end. And press can show V to paste. Basically, we've copied
these keyframes, and now we want to
reverse their positions. So it will go from this dark
keyframe to this light. The easiest thing is to select them and right
mouse click on them and go to Keyframe Assistant
and time reverse keyframes. So now we've swapped and we can just select
the ski frames, last ones, and expand it a bit. It will slow down the animation
of this light goes out. And you can always play around to see what works
best with your scene, so it would look a
lot more natural. Once again, if you have your
own scene, just play around. It's not a super precise. It's just by feeling how fast your transition
is going to be. Okay, so this is
our first step in our compositing our
fire in our scene. And the next video,
I'm going to show you how you can add
a little shake, so it will look a bit
even more intense. And then we will try to comp
ourselves into our shot. See you in the next video.
3. Camera Shake: Okay. So in this video, we are going to add
some camera shake, so it will look
even more intense. But before it's a
good idea to go to file and save your project. And you can just simply save it wherever you want
on your computer. It's a good idea to
save your project because sometimes after
effects can crash. Okay, so let's add a
bit of camera shake, so it will look even better. We can just simply go to
layer, new adjustment layer. And we can press
return to rename it, and let's call it shake. So for the camera shake, we can use effect
called transform. Here efect and presets, let's type transform, select it and drop it on
your adjustment layer. And here what we want
to do is to go to about 12 frames and create
a keyframe for scale. We will need to zoom in, so we will use scale
to zoom in a bit because when we will try
to shake the camera, we will shake with these two
values of position X and Y. As you can see, X is
horizontal and Y is vertical. You can see, we're
getting these parts of the image where we don't
have any information. So I'm going to press Control
Z to undo these steps. By the way, you can always press Control Z to undo if
you did some mistake. So let's press Yon
keyboard to see our scale keyframe about here
at 2 seconds and 15 frames. Let's zoom in just a
tiny bit, like 112. And we can select this and press F nine to make this
Zoomin a bit smoother. And if you will click
here on this icon, we can go to Graph
Editor and select this keyframe by selecting
on this little handle. You can drag to the
left and just make sure that you are on
this orange line. So basically, it
allows you to create this really fast movement and then slower
till this keyframe. So let's go out from this
graph editor and you gins it gives this little
push in with the camera, which makes it a
bit more exciting. Then to create a little
bit of camera shake, we want to use an expression. But before, let's go to effects
and presets and type here slider and just drag the slider control on our
shake adjustment layer. And with this slider,
we will control the amount of shake
which we want to have. And to add the shake itself, we need to hold old
key on keyboard and left mostly on this
position stopwatch. It will allow us to
create an expression. And we don't need to know
anything about coding. We just need to type here wiggle because this is
exactly what we want. We want to wiggle our
camera and open bracket, and then just simply
take this sick web, left no lick in it, and hold, drag it here to this slider. And just before this
effect, word effect, we can type it here ten, and let's also type comma. So with this value of ten, we are telling how frequent
this wiggle should be. And with this second value, which is the slider because we just connected to the slider, we will say how much the
amplitude should be. So for example, as you can
see if I'm moving a lot more, it will have this
insane amplitude. So in our case, we
will set to zero here, and let's just go to second, second, and ninth frame just before this really
violent explosions. So about here, we want to create our first keyframe to our
slider, which is zero. So no wiggle will be here. Let's press Yon keyboard
and once again. See only our key frames and about at 2 seconds
and 23 frames. Just on this second explosion, we want to increase this
wiggle to maybe, like, 25. So now as you can see
we're introducing this really nice camera shake. And at 4 seconds where
it already exploded, we can just set it this to zero. So now if I'm going
to press zero numpad, you can see that
we have the Zoomn then nice camera shake and we can add Zoom
out effect as well. So basically, once again, we can just simply
select this scale, which is our Zoom animation. Press control C to copy
and here control V to paste and write most licking it and go to
keyframe assistant, and time reverse
these keyframes. So basically, it will zoom out. But this time, we want to go to graph editor and make sure that this second
keyframe will be super slow at the
end and go out from this graph editor and hold Control and click
on this keyframe. So basically, it will
make this animation go fast and slower towards the end. So you can see the
Zoom out animation will look also pretty smooth. So now we have this
Zoom in animation, camera shake, and
zoom out animation. So now you can see
this shot looks a lot more fun and interesting. And the next video, I'm going
to show you how you can add yourself into this shot.
See you in the next video.
4. Completing the VFX Shot: So we have created really nice explosion and camera shake. Now we left to do is
to add ourselves. And if we just simply
enable ourselves, you can see that we did
not appear as we wanted. And even if I'm going to
change this to lighten, it really doesn't work as great as it worked
with our explosion. So in this case, if you have
green screen or blue screen, it's a really good idea
to shoot yourself on that blue screen or green screen because it's much easier
to cut yourself out. My case, I wanted to make it as beginner
friendly as I could. So I did not use any blue
screen or green screen, and we can just use a
simple rotoscoping. So let me show you how
you can cut out yourself if you don't have a blue
screen or green screen. So for this, I want to
duplicate this layer. We can just select
it and go to edit, duplicate or Control D. And this layer below, I'm
just going to hide it by clicking on this eyeball because I'm going
to need it later. And this on top, I'm just
going to select it and just press Enter and rename it myself Rodo, which
means Rotoscoping. This is exactly the technique
which we are going to use. If you are familiar
with this technique, you can just skip a few
minutes of this video to get to a point where we are going
to add linear wipe effect. But I'm going to show you
how to use rata Scapping. So to use Rata Brush tool, which is basically this one, you need to select your
video of yourself, leftmost double kicking it
to get into this layer mode. And only then you can just
simply set your time cursor to the beginning zoom in to see yourself select this
Rata brush tool. You can also press a Tilda
key on your keyboard, as you can see it looks
something like this. Basically, it's the button
below the escape button. And with this tilda key, you can expand any panel on your Ado after
effects software. And if you will press it again, it will go out from this mode. So it's pretty handy
because we want to expand this window here. So just move your cursor
here and expand it with the tiilda key and with
the scroll on the mouse, you can just zoom in or zoom
out to see yourself better. Then you can hold Control on keyboard and leftmost
lick and hold and jack to the
right or to the left to make your brush
smaller or bigger. For me, something
of this size should work fine and just let
go of Control button, and now you can just
simply leftmost click and draw on yourself. So basically, you can just draw like this with the green brush, and in those cases, when you have something that
you don't want to have, you can just hold old key. It changes to this
red tool and you can just leftmost click and delete the parts
which you don't want. And let go of Alt key, and once again, you can add some parts which you
want to include. So basically, this is
like painting yourself. Then hold Control and
press Write arrow key. And this is how you
can go frame by frame, as you can see, and pressing
Control and we arrow key. Just make sure to see that you don't include anything
which you don't want. In my case, I don't want this. I just remove it and once again, control right arrow and just remove the parts which
I don't want to include. I'm using this light
as a transition point. But basically, you can just easily rat scap entire yourself. Just make sure to not ratscop anything from your background, just like this and just
rate scap only yourself. Here you have two variations,
how you can rate a scap. You can rate a scap like
I've shown you here before, just like a reveal
or you can rato scap yourself entirely
like I'm doing right now. Both ways will work
fine just because we are going to reveal
ourselves using another effect, which will just simply
go as a wipe and introduce ourself into our shot and just make sure
that it stays on you. For this class, I'm not going
to make it super perfect. Just do not waste any time. But basically,
this is main idea. You just trying to rotoscop on yourself
from the background. And the better job
you're going to do, the better effect
will look at the end. So I'm going to run
pretty quickly. So let's say that
we've done this part. And once you've done your
rotoscoping of yourself, you need to click
Freeze button because only this button will allow
you to save your progress. So let's click
Freeze and just wait for it to save all
of your progress. Go to file and
save your project. In other case, if you didn't
freeze all of scoping, it will not be able to
remember what you did. Okay, so this freeze
process is complete. Now we can go to File Save. And if you want to
tweak your rotoscoping, you need to click on
this freeze button again to unfreeze it and clean up the things which you want to clean and
then freeze it again. Okay, so this is pretty much
the process of rotoscoping, and now we can go to
the selection tool and then click here on
composition Ra video. So we'll go back
from this layer mode to our composition mode. And just drag it here to see how we can
appear in our shot. So first thing which we want to do is to clean up the edges. As you can see, we have a
little line on our head, and this is pretty easy to fix. You can just select
your myself role and go to effects and presets. And here we have a bunch of
settings which we can change. So first thing which I want to change is to change
this feather. I want to set it to, like, 3.4. To get a bit more
details and contrast, I want to increase to like 90. So basically, we get
even sharper edges. But I want to shift this edge
so it will cut out more. As you can see, by
changing this shift edge, you can cut out the
brightest parts if you want to clean
your hair even better. So in my case, something
like -60 worked pretty well. So now we need to transition in ourselves a lot better because
now it looks pretty bad. So first easy thing
which you can do is just simply select
your myself roto. Move it just below of
this main fire reveal. And as you can see, it looks
a lot better right now, and we can even
adjust it so it will be at 2 seconds and 28 frames. So now as you can see, we
appeared pretty much entirely, and let's go to
effects and precess to make this linear wipe effect, so we will appear
from top to bottom. So effects and press, let's type linear wipe and here under transitions like
this linear wipe effect. And dragon drop here
on Myself Rodo. So with this effect,
as you can see, we can cut ourselves from left to right, but we
don't want that. So let's change
this angle to zero, so we will cut ourselves
from top to bottom. And also, we need to
change this feather, so this transition would
be a lot smoother. So in my case, I
want to set to 150, but you can play
around with this value and see what works best for you. And let's also set the first keyframe here at
the beginning of this layer. So I'm going to set
this transition. Frame, we clicking on this
stopwatch and set it to 100%. So basically, we
completely are invisible. And about here where our
fire just about disappear. We can set it to zero, so we would be fully visible. So let's scroll through
to see how it looks. As you can see, it
looks pretty good, but we need to tweak a bit more, so this transition here
would look a lot better. So first thing which
we can do is to add more video files to it
because as you remember, here in Project panel, we've
imported a bunch of files. So now we can use this smoke
and this transition smoke. So let's start with this
smoke towards the camera. Just place it here just
below this shake layer, and as you can see,
it's basically this smoke towards
the camera effect. And we can change
this mode to scream, so it will blend nicely with
our video just like this. And also, we can add
this transition smoke just below of the smoke and
also let's set it to scream. So we would add even more
elements of the smoke here, which will last after our fire. But now I want to have
this fire a bit lower so it will cover our shoes
because as you can see, it represents this floor. And it would look a lot better if it will be somewhere
along your feet. So we will need to move
everything together, our smoke and our fire. Super easy way to do this
is to select the smoke, then hold control
on your keyboard, select your transition
smoke and this MT fire, and then select this parent Pick Whip under parent and link, and not here a track MT and just select it and drag it to
this main fire reveal. And this way, we will link all of our videos to this one video. And now we can just
press P on keyboard And basically move the
position of this fire. So first of all,
I wanted to move it a lot lower, just like this. So now it looks a lot better, and pretty much from this point, you can even move it
to right if you want to set yourself in the middle
of the fire just like this. So this is totally up to you. And as you remember,
the final thing, we still have this Myself
video in our shot, and you can just simply
enable it by clicking here on this eyeball
to see this video. What we want to do
with this video which we left in our composition, we want to time it with
this video of Radascop. Also let's expand
it these videos and what I want to
do with this video, I just want to
place it just below this transition smoke and about here where we have clear shot, just like this, press T on keyboard and create a
keyframe for opacity. Let's move this keyframe a bit further and set this to zero. Basically, we will transition
into our original shot. So we would have more shadows because as you can see if
we will disable this layer, we don't really get
these nice shadows which really blends ourselves
into the shot even more. Also we can just
select this myself, roto and make sure
that we reveal ourselves in the
fire about here. Let's press on keyboard
and let's move a bit this keyframe so we
will not see our face, and it will start
introduced right here. We can see a bit of ourselves, and then it will transition smoothly to ourselves entirely. This is pretty much
how you can do this effect in Adobe
after effects. Always excited to
see your projects. So feel free to click here on submtPject and share
your project with me. It's really cool to
see your result when you're using my videos
which I provide, and it's even cooler when you film yourself and
sharing your result. I always check your projects and give you feedback
if you want. Also, feel free to follow
me here on Skillshare. Have a lot of classes on VFX, using Adobe After effects, I recommend you to watch
this really short class which only takes 12 minutes, but you'll get really
powerful result at the end. As you can see, I have
a lot of VFX classes. You can click here on CMR, to see even more VFX. Also, I have new classes
this month section, free AI tools, which I use
for VFX and other stuff. I have classes on fundamentals
of Adobe After effects, as well as complex VX, using even Cinema four D and complex after
effects techniques. I have logo animation classes, the int resolve
class, and even more. By the way, you can request
any effects or animation in discussion section under any of my classes, even this one. Follow me here on skill share, and I'll be happy to see you in my next class. Thank
you for watching.
M Jake, Lets Create VFX & Cool Stuff Together
