Animation in Adobe After Effects: Thor Lightning VFX

1. Introduction: Power Bank. Hi, I'm Jake. This class will teach you how to create a lightning effect for social media using Adobe After Effects and without using any plugins. This class is interesting because you can choose your own adventure. So what I mean is that this class has videos labeled using AI and videos labeled no AI. So basically, you can learn how to create a lightning effects shot in two ways. First way, using AI tools such as CHA GPT and SRA. And the second way is just by using only Adobe After effects. You don't need any experience working with Adobe After effects. You can even download the free child version to learn this effect and it will work fine. You can always write your questions in discussion section under any of my classes to get help from me while creating cool effects. 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 cool lighting effect for your social media using Adobe After Effects. I'll be happy to see in my class as also your result after following all the steps. So, let's get started. 2. Preparing Footage: Hi, I'm Jake, and I'm using Adobe After Effects 2024, but you can pretty much use any version of Adobe After Effects and it will work fine. If you cannot see some of the panels, which you can see on my screen, you can always go to Window and enable it from here. For example, character character. So first thing which we need to do is to go to File Import File. And let's import all files which is available to this class. These files you can find and resource step to this class. So let's download them and just select them and Import. So basically, you have two videos is footage using AI and footage without AI. 3. Using AI (Sora+ChatGPT): Okay, just keep in mind that on free version, you cannot use the SRA for free. So if you have a HAGPT plus the minimum subscription base, you'll be able to use this SOR. So for the rest of this video, I'm going to show you how you can use and what you need to prompt to create a kind of animation which I've got in my video example, which you can see in preview to this class. If you don't have access to HAGPTPlus or any other AI, which can create a video from the image and prompts. Skip to next video of this class. You'll see what you can get without using any AI. Let's start with the footage with AI because it's the most easiest way to create this effect. I'm going to select it and drag and drop here on timeline or on this new composition button. Now we have our video. Basically, it's almost the entire video. As you can see here, I'm just feeling myself putting up my Power bank, then I making this kind of move, let's take a look how you can create this kind of video and which tools I've used to exact this effect. Thing which I did, let me open this footage with no AI. I did this kind of move to have a reference point what I want to see from AI. So basically, I've just rendered this frame, just one frame. You can just simply take your video. If you shut yourself on the video, you can just simply take one frame from the video where you're holding something up, then make sure to have just one frame and go to composition, add to render Q. In few seconds, it will open up and you can just change to JPEG sequence and click Okay. Then specify where you want it to save. Let me save here to the folder which you will be able to download and I'm going to save to no AI folder. So here will be a screenshot and save and click Random. This way, you can just render one frame of your video and use it as a reference. Next thing you can do is to go to chagpt.com, just like this and just log in with your Google account or any other account. It will be free and then just drop here and add a file. You need to click on this plus sign and then go to add photos and files. Then let's locate our screenshot, which we just rendered and click Open. Then we need to set up a prompt. Basically, you can just type a really small prompt and in simple English or in your native language. It pretty much understands you very good. So in my case, I wrote something like keep my original everything should stay the same and generate a lot of lightning that comes from power bank that I'm holding in the air with my right arm. The room should be lit from a lighting as well or something like this. It will be a great starting point. And let me copy this prompt and also add here. So I'm going to create a text file where you can just copy these prompts. So this would be first prompt. I'm going to save. You'll be able to download it and let's send it and see what HGPT will generate. It will take a few seconds and these parts I'll cut out from the class, so we will not waste any time. Now I've got my results and I've tried two times because first time it did really save my original example of the image. It doesn't really looks like a great composition. I've tried one more time. And this one looks much better because it lighting myself with the lights, and it did a black and white version because I provided a black and white image. Just keep in mind if you will use a normal colors of your image in my case, it was blue and red. I will result in something like this where you have your skin tones and these kind results. So keep in mind if you will use not black and white footage, you're going to get a colorful image, something like this. It also I've got from Cha JBT. Also keep in mind that sometimes these image generations can take a lot of time if you will use a free version, as you can see, I'm using free version. Just keep in mind that sometimes it takes a while. As I can see, on the free version, you'll get a two tries, and basically, then you'll need to wait 24 hours to get another image. But even with these two tries, I've got this image, which I think it will work great. I'm going to save this one, save image S. I'm going to create a GPD folder. Where I'm going to save it. If you would want to use, you can use this one as well. So I'm going to call black and white GPT. The next thing which I've done, I just went to the S link. So basically on your chgpt.com website, you can just left most lick, and it will lead you to this website. So basically how you can use this website, you can just click here on image and change to video, then set this resolution to nine by 16. And here you can choose the quality and increase up to 10 seconds long videos, then you'll be able to upload your image. Et's agree with these things and click Accept. And then I just dropped my image into here. And basically, I didn't describe anything. I just prompted as it is, and click and create a video. But this time, I want to write a prompt because I want this lightning to be colored in blue. So color the light inks and blue cyan colors, add skin tone, and leave black and white feel or a little movement of the camera and lightning flashes a bunch of time. Something like this could work great. I'm going to copy this into our runs, which I'm going to share with you, resource step to this class, and four versions will be great because you'll get pre random results. Going to show you which results I've got earlier. But for now, let's create this video. Okay, so I've added to Q, and let me show you which results I've got earlier. So as you can see here, I went with two versions because I went with higher quality. But as you can see, it sometimes can generate just some mess unusable because I didn't really specify my scene. And sometimes I just tried to upload my image and see what GPT will come up. In most cases, it will randomly apply some of the prompts itself to itself and try to generate from it. This is a pretty funny one. This is actually looks great, but the lighting doesn't go from the Power bank itself. I didn't use this one, so radio it generated a few versions. This looks actually pretty cool. I like this one. It doesn't have any colors, but once again, if you will use a original video, if you will use not black and white version, you'll get a nice and original colors. As you can see here, we can get some colors as well. It's a good learning point that it's way better to use not just a black and white image. In most cases, if you will run through once again, just like this, I'm going to send it again. It may do a better job, so just keep in mind that you can just send it a few times if you have once again HIGPDPlus version. In my case, I can just simply select this one and click here to Download and download it as well to show you how you can use even this kind of result. I'm going to call it new version. You can guess when you use something like AI, you can always create a new results because it is pretty random. Let me save it and until this will generate another few options, let me import this video which we already got and let me show you how we can try to use it. What I want to do is to go to AI folder. Here's new version. And basically, what would I do? I can just simply open this footage with AI which we created. And instead of this video, we can just simply drag and drop our video which we got. We can also resize it to fill the screen or just simply press Control A F. I will fit to screen. Let's set this resolution to fall, so it would be much better. And let's find the moment where it looks pretty good. So I like this small movement from this point in time. So I'm going to cut it to this moment, so we will get this kind of transition to this moment. You can guess we don't need actually this much of the video because the next frame, I've created in the same way. I just took my screenshot just like this. I've asked Cha GPT to create an image, something like this, and then I've prompted Tsura and it created basically the same workflow as we did here. So what we can do if we get only a black and white version. So first thing which I would want to do is to go to Effects and Presets panel. Just left mostly here. If you cannot see the effects and press panel, you can just enable it here, Window effects and presets. Basically, I would use something like tritone, select it and drag it here, and here we can just change this color to a bluish one and just increase it a bunch and maybe let's add a bit of saturation and play around to see what color you like the most, then you can just apply something like curves and increase it a bit maybe at some contrast or decrease it even to see what kind of dramatic look you would want to get. You can even play around with the placement of this and guess, you can get a bit different results if you will take a look at the face you can see that it gets a bit different results. I think this version looks pretty good, and by the way, if you would want to colorize in a bit more professional way, it's a good idea to go to Video coopilot. We can just type video copilot and type VC color vibrant. This is basically a free plugin from Video coopilot that you can download. You can just click here to download the plugin and follow the instructions how to install it. And basically, if I'm going to type here VC color vibrant, I can just remove these effects. And apply this one. As you can see, you can get a much more variety of colors and the effect, which is pretty cool. And by play around with these settings, you can get a bit more professional and more cooler look, and as you can see, if you will reduce it, it may give you a better option. You can see with this color of the Gamma, you can even add a bit of flickering, which provides you a more dramatic look. Basically, if I'm going to hold old key on keyboard and left mostly on Gamma, I can just type wiggle expression set to six, its amount of frequency, how often it will wiggle. And how much it will legal, I'm going to set to 0.5% because as you can see, these values is 0.8 value, so I don't want to go overboard because it may results even worse example. So as you can see, now I've added this flickering, which looks also pretty nice and cool. And if you change this to something like 15, flickering will be a lot. It will happen a lot more often. And final thing which I would do is press selecting this layer. Press P on keyboard to see the position, create a keyframe, hold shift, and press S on keyboard to see the scale. And here at the beginning of this clip, I would scale into Power bank. So we would have this kind of animation for nice little transition. And then I would select these keyframes and maybe one by one. Let's select position. This one, drag it down by this handle, then select scale, select it. Ragging down, dragging up to this line orange line to get this smooth kind of motion. Basically, what it does, it goes really fast to the beginning and slower till the end. And if you will drag this point to the left and also this point to the left, it will start really fast and then slower. And once again, you can just click here to add a motion blur, tag and switches on this button, you can click and then set this motion blur as well here. So now we have even a motion blur for this transition, which looks pretty cool. And here I would add also a little motion, so it will transition even better. So basically, I would also press Peon keyboard, press S, hold shift, and press S to see position at scale. And here, I would scale it up and drag it down, and this time, I would select these keyframes and go to Graph Editor and drag to this floor line, then select scale, also select the ski frame and drag it to the floor line, and this way, I would get this kind of camera movement. As you can see, I've added Zoom here and zoom out here. So it's not a great idea, so it would be more logical if I would make it a lot smaller, something like this. So this Zoom will continue just like this. So now as you can see the motion looks a lot smoother and cooler. So basically what you do is to scale up here. Here, you need to scale down your footage and then scale up to fill the screen. And as you can see, now we have these parts which are not filled. Basically, you can go to effects and presets and type here, motion. Tile, select this motion tile and drop it on our video. And let's make sure to see if it works. As you can see, we're expanding the edges. And if you will click on this mirror edge checkbox, it will mirror the edges, and it would look like it's expanded. So as you can see now we have this really nice transition and nice flickering. If you don't want to use this, we see color vibrant. You can just disable it and use these effects. And to get a flickering, you can just simply go to effects and presets and type here exposure effect here under color correction exposure, you can just drop it this effect and animate this Gamma correction. Basically, once again, you can just hold Alt key on keyboard, left mostly on stopwatch and type wiggle, set this to 15 and amount set to one. And now as you can see, we also have this interesting flickering. In my case, maybe let's set 2.5, so it will not overblow the colors. And now it looks pretty interesting as well. And then you can just cut to whatever moment you would want. So in my case, I'm going to change this work area to preview only this moment. So as you can see, flickering is a bit much. You can always select your layer and press double time. You on keyboard and adjust how much of the flickering you would want to use on each effect on exposure effect, and if you would use VC color vibrant on vibrance effect. In my case, I would reduce it and something like this looks a lot better. So this is how you can use AI to get interesting results. And as you can see, the second attempt gave me a better kind of quality because now we have some colors. Okay, and next video, I'm going to show you how to create this effect or something similar to this without using any AI. See the next video. 4. NO AI Version: So in previous video, I've showed you how I've created this effect using AI just by sending this to a SA model from Cha GPT and created a bunch of options. And in this video, let's try to mimic kind of this kind of look, and I'm going to hide this layer by clicking on this stopwatch. Also, you can even go to footage with no AI. Basically, you can just we've imported our footages and you can just simply select no AI and dragon drop on this icon to create a composition. We will try to add some effects to mimic the results which we got from AI version, something similar without using any AI models. What we need to do is to go to File, Import File. And here you can open this AI folder and you can find the things which I've generated for my preview and this exact video I've used for preview, also, I've used AI to create a bunch of lightings, which we can use for this video of this class. Basically, we have these two videos which looks pretty interesting, and I think we can create something cool with this. Select four and six video and click Ibart. Let's inward this video four. Press as on keyboard and let's increase it and change this to add. So now we have this really nice flash, and let's find what kind of flash we like to use. Maybe something like this. So you can see we have here a ground, so we can just simply select this rectangle tool and cut it or just size it even more, resize it to like 170% and drag it down. Next thing which I would want to use is curse effect and dragon drop here, just like this and increase the amount of the contrast. In my case, I would want to use some of the moments just like here and cut it this footage. I'm going to hold Alt key and then open square bracket. It will cut to this moment where I have my time cursor to have this lightning just before the next video. Something like this works great, then I hold old key on keyboard and close square bracket to cut to this moment what I would want to do, I would want to have a little Rtoscoping. I just would use my original footage, skin SLD to duplicate and move it up and then just simply leftmost double click. On this top one, I can even select it and press Enter and call it a roto for rata scoping and select this Rota brush tool and just drag it along my body, so we will rato scap only ourselves, which will allow us to place a lighting behind us. Something like this, let's include the hair. Also the hand, you can spend more time to get a good rata scoping. But for my case a rough version because I don't really think that we need so much details for a few frames of this video. Basically we left mostly you adding some things which you would want to include, and if you will hold old key, you are deselecting things which you don't want to rats cap. We have our mask and now just simply can go to our preview. If you cannot see this panel, you can just simply go to Window and enable it from here preview panel. Just go frame by frame to see the progress. And as you can see, it looks pretty good because I don't have that much movement in this shot, and it did pretty good job. Okay, so to save my progress, you need to click on this freeze button, so let most in it. Okay, so it went a bit more. Basically, what I really need to do is to cut this video to this moment. So let's select this moment where I want to use is basically only this frame. This shot. So I'm going to hold Olski and then open square bracket to cut. As you can see, I've cut in this layer and cut to this moment as well. So it will not freeze too much because I don't need this footage which came before. Okay, so we have our frozen footage. We can just freeze it again to make sure that we get only this part just like this. And then we can go to main composition which we are working in. Then go to selection and here I usually play around with this feather to feather the edge a bit. But the better thing is to change this contrast. It also allows us to control the edge even better. So I'm increasing my feather to, like, 55 and contrast, we can just play around to see how it looks, and usually I shift the edge to the left, so it will kind of cover me a bit. So as you can see it already covers a bit, and now we can even feather more to get a bit of light on ourselves, and maybe let's reduce some contrast. Maybe feather even more. Now we get a little bit of lighting from background on ourselves, which already looks much better, but we can do a bunch of things which can help to sell this effect even more. I can just simply go and use simple tritone effect because with the tritone effect here under correction, tritone, I can just simply set one color which I like and use it just like this. So I'm going to select this one, and as you can see, it provides a complete control over this, and we can just swap the places and in this way, you can get a bit more color variation. Also, you can use a glow effect. Let's type glow and jack it here, increase the radius, and with this threshold, you can manage how much of this glow you would want to spread and which colors you would want to include. And if you will duplicate this glow, going to get even wider glow, something like this to colorize your sin even more. So as you can see if I would change this glow threshold to lower number, we can colorize our sin even more. And with this, we can change the colors and the brightness to tweak it even more. So next step will be, as you can see, our rata video here is not colorized. So it's a good idea to also use something like tritone effect. So it will match the light even better. So let's change the highlights to a bluish tone just like this. So now it will fit our seen better. But if you are used to use a curse effect, you can just simply diselect the striton effect and use instead a curse effect. Tone is easier to understand for beginners because here basically is highlights, mid tones and shadows. So basically, if shadows I would want to have in bluish tones, I would just colorize like this, then these colors, I would set mid tones to Yenish kind of color, and white is good for highlights because if you will change to something like this, it will get unnatural. But if you have some experience with curves, it's a good idea to use curves because it provides a bit more variations in colors. So as you can see, by just selecting this blue line and create some kind of this curve, then I would want to reduce the red, and with the green, I can colorize any color which I want. And as you can see with the simple curse alignment, I can fit the scene even better. So one of the things which I can also do is to select our lighting and set it just here so it will light up from our power bank. It's a good idea to have some feather on the edges. What we can do, we can just left most and double click on this rectangle tool. It will create a mask and we can just simply set this expansion to lower and then just feather the edge, something like this could work fine. As you can see we are getting our first lightning here at the beginning, which already looks not bad. And we can just simply select it and press Control D to duplicate and select our other lightning and select here our duplicate. Then select this six MP four video, hold ldskey on keyboard, and just make sure to select here and here and this way while holding old Skey, left mouse click and hold and drag on top of this video and let go. It will swap the layers. So why is this important? Because it stays with all of these effects which we applied earlier. So it's pretty handy to not repeat all the process once again. And now we can just simply find the moment of this video, which we like the most, and we can just simply use for the background. We can even press on keyboard and select this mask and delete it, and we can press R on keyboard and rotate it to have this kind of lighting goes from our Power bank, something like this. And this time, we can create a mask using pen tool maybe let's cut this so it will not be that noticeable that these lines are really straight like this. I'm going to select this mask and close it here, press a font keyboard and feather a bit, just like this. And let's see how it looks. Now as you can see here, it's all about timing. Let's select this layer and cut to this moment. And just like this, we are getting a really nice look and we can just duplicate, press Control D to duplicate, press R to rotate, and let's select the selection tool and move it here and let's rotate even more in place so it would go from our power bank. It's a good idea to hide behind the hand because we have a Rotascopt layer. Even better idea will be offset this layer, so we would get different kind lightnings just like this. As you can see, it looks really fun and interesting. It's a good idea to also, as you can see here, we can just simply cut our radoscope layer and left a few frames, it will go behind us and in front of us, which gives this really nice look and depth to our effect. Basically, you can just select any of these lightnings effects, press control D to duplicate and populate your sin as much as you want to get even more T D look. So some of them you can make it smaller so to get this kind of depth to the sin. The last thing which you would want to do, as you can see, we have a completely discolor on me stays the same, and what we can do is to select our Rutter brush layer and create a keyframe for the curse effect. Here at the beginning, we can just simply click Reset. Now as you can see, these curves are applying a bit later, and just simply by making sure that these lightings appear at different moments, we can create this effect. And finally, which I would want to add is maybe one more layer of this lighting, press con sal D and place it on top because it really sells this three D kind of look if some of the lightnings will go in front of me just like this. And also let's offset it a bit. Final thing which I would want to use is to select this Rata brush layer and copy this curse effect. Basically, when you copy this curse effect, it will copy these keyframes as well, which is colorizing the layer. And it's important because when we are going to apply this effect and we would want to apply to this main footage, it will apply these keyframes as well. Make sure to apply it a bit before like here Chol V. As you can see, we've pasted our curs effect by simply selecting here, selecting this curse effect, pressing Control C to copy, then to our background. As you can see, I've selected this background layer and just press Consol V to paste our curves. If you press on keyboard, you'll see these keyframes, this original keyframe, which has the original curves, and then it goes to these curves which colorize our scene. If I'm unsold this layer, you can see that now colors are basically filling all of our scene. If you press Yon keyboard and set to this last keyframe, we can even add another curves and create a more violent look by increasing the contrast, something like this. So now, as you can see, we can add a bit more cool effect, and let's make sure that here at the beginning, it will have original layers and then the nice effects. I'm going to cut these layers lt and square bracket, and it will transition to your next exactly the same you can do with your hand. Basically, you can apply a bunch of these effects, as I showed you here on your simple footage of your hand, this exact same technique. Just keep in mind if you would want to control all of the layers colors, you can always just go to layer new adjustment layer, set it on top. Just type tritone effect, for example, to set it to one color, and then you can just type a curse effect and control this look even more with two tones of the effect. And as I've showed you before, you can just not use these ones, but rather use tint effect to make it once again into tones, then apply currese effect. With the curves, the blue curve at a bit of blue, and then reduce the red and play around with the green to get the colors which you like and basically get more control of the tint of this effect. And I would use another curse effect just for the contrast to get this kind of look. So as you can see now we have this kind of colorization, and we can just simply apply it using opacity. So I'm going to press Ton keyboard to see the opacity. Here at the beginning, I would reduce it, then it will apply it and we can just leave it as it is and swap to the next. In this way, the colors will stay consistent across all of your video. Basically here you can always tweak these colors to get the exact tone of the blue which you would like. Maybe something like Sayan would look even better. This is how you can create this effect without using AI. As you can see, it still looks pretty cool because the lighting covers our video and it goes around of me, which looks really cool. A 5. NO AI Finalizing VFX: Final thing which I would add to this effect, basically, I would simply split this layer, press Control, Shift D to split this layer, and then here as well, control, shift D to split this layer as well. I would cut this adjustment layer to this moment. Basically, what I want to do is to have all of my effects, all this shot only in one composition. Now when I split it and cut it, I can just simply go to layer, precompose, and let's call it first, the effect shot. Click Okay. So this will help me to use something like motion tile and dragging drop here. And basically, if I'm going to move this tile center and click on this mirror edge, you can see that we can add a bit of camera shake. We can just reset it, quick click on these mirror edges. What we can do, we can go to effects and presets and type here slider, apply the slider control. We're going to increase or decrease the camera movement. So first of all, we need to hold old Keon keyboard left most click on this tile center and type here wiggle first value, as you know, is the value of how much it will wiggle. Basically, you can just left mostly and hold this pick web and connect it to the slider, then type. We can just duplicate this second slider and here just before this last bracket, you can just type and connect to this slider. Let's set this one to 15 and this to ten. And now, as you can see, we have this wiggle and we can even animate it, so we can set this to 15 and here at the beginning to zero, so it will increase with the time. In my case, from my experience, it's better not have any wiggle and then increase a bit later, just like this. With this second slider control, we can just control the amount. So if I'm going to set to 55, we'll get a lot of wiggle, so this is how you can control this insane camera movement. So maybe just set this first value, make sure to set your time cursor on top this keyframe and change it maybe to something like nine. So it will not go so wild and this one to 33 and have this kind of effect. Last thing which I would want to add is CC force motion blur, select it and drop it onto your video. And if you will increase the shutter angle, you'll see how much of the blur you are going to get and to increase the quality of the blur, increase the samples up to 15, and it will get you a much smoother force motion blur. So let's press numpad to see how it looks. The exact same technique I would apply to this to get these kinds of lightnings and it's a good inspiration to look closely how AI created this kind of lightnings. So now if I'm looking close, how it looks, I can see that we have a main lightnings and I see some blurred lightnings, which we can also use to even improve this effect even more so we can just open. And for example, we can just precompose all of our lightning layers or just use some of them. So for example, let's find some interesting which is on top, just like this one, and press control D and like this one below, which we just duplicate it and apply something like gaussian blur, something like this. It works like glow. But if you will use something like CC vector blur and apply it here as well, and decrease it a bunch and reduce this main glow, we can get a bit more of variation. So let's try to decrease to 25 increase this one. We can get a bit more of variation and distortion of our effect, which could look pretty interesting and we can tweak it even more. So if you will sololow this layer, you can see exactly what we are doing. And as you can see, we are adding even more kind of details to this effect. It can elevate our look even more. Let me disable this force motion blur. You can see that it adds a bit more of dimension for our lightning which makes this effect even cooler. Let's press zero on amp it to see the final result. As you can imagine, if you will add this blur to each of these lightnings, you'll get really nice result, which will be really close to this AI version. Basically, if we will select all of these layers and press control shift to precompose, let's call it all lightnings and duplicate. Et's also set this to add just like this and select this and duplicate this layer. We can also add a Gaussian blur and just blurt out a bunch to get a bit more of this blur. Let's set it to screen or maybe overlay to get more like this look with the fill of this glow, your entire scene. And if you change to screen, it will be even better. So now, as you can see, we're getting closer and closer to this generation of AI, but using only our human skills. So just don't be afraid to experiment and keep trying the new stuff because as you can see, as long as we are trying new stuff, the better result we can get. And you can always go back by pressing ContLZ a bunch of times to the moment which you like the most. So for now, I'm really happy with this look. As you can see, we're getting a lot of linings and it wraps around ourselves which looks really nice. And we did it ourselves without using any AI. Feel free to follow me here on Skillshare. I have a lot of classes on Vc. As you can see, here is a section VX using Adobe After Effects. You can even click on here on C More to see the more effects using Adobe After effects, as well as the section new classes this month, and you can check out the newest classes which I've created. Here is fundamentals of Adobe After Effects. You can also click on C More to See More, Log animation. Free AI tools, which I've used and also complex VX, D Venture Resolve, and even more classes on Adobe After effects. Make sure to click here on projects and resource and click submit the project. I check all of your projects and give you feedback if you want. Thank you for taking time to watch my classes. Make sure to follow me here on Skillshare, and I'll be happy to see you in my next class. Thank you for watching.