Ant-Man Shrinking Effect using Adobe After Effects

1. Introduction: This effect, we will create rate now, hi, I'm Jake. And in this lesson, we will go step-by-step on creating this effect. We will not use green stream or a blue screen to make this effect. And you don't need any external plugins. Any version of Adobe After Effects will work, even free trial version will work to this less is excellent for beginners. I'll provide all needed foolish to create this effect has also, I'll explain every step which you need to make to learn this technique and to apply to your own footage. I've also included a practice VFS shot on which you can try to replicate the effect after all needed techniques which I provided. And in the final video, I'll show you a really cool technique of guiding yourself out from the background, which is a great alternative for rotoscoping or using agreeing stream. I go through each step and explain all features which you need to know so you would be able to use it in your own future projects. Don't be afraid that this class is more than 30 minutes. There is not that much to learn. I'm just making sure to explain every step of the effect. And once you learn it, you'll be able to create these effects in less than five minutes. It's a really easy technique, but it gives you a very powerful results. Feel free to follow me here on Skillshare for a more VFX classes. At now, let's get started. 2. Basic Animation of Shrinking: I'm using Adobe After Effects 2020 one. If you can see some of these panels, which you can see on my screen, you can enable it from here, from window, for example, character, character. So let's import our footage. To import our footage, we can double-click here in project panel or go to file import file. These three video files will be available in the resource step to this class. So just select them and click import. Let's double-click on this first one and see what we got. As you can see it to make this effect you need to feel in yourself from tripod. So camera should not move. And you do some motional that you present in some button. To shrink down, you need to step out of the frame and film the background for a little bit like this. So let's start with this footage. Just leftmost look on it and drag it here to create new composition, are here on timeline to also create new composition. So I am going to really sit here. So now what we want to do is to find the moment where I am disappearing and find the very last frame. If you're using your own footage, you need to select the prime where you're pressing some buttons to shrink down. So in my case, this is this frame. So what do we need to do is to duplicate this video. You can just select it with leftmost lick and then press Control D to duplicate it. Or you can go to Edit, duplicate Control D or Command D. If you're on a Mac. Then let's cut this video to this moment by this candle here, you can just hover on this edge, which allows you to cut to this moment. If you hold Shift, you can snap to this time cursor, timeline cursor and ordered. So have ourselves still in the brain. We can right mouse click on this video and go to time freeze frame, which will freeze this last frame where we are available. And if I am going to scroll through, you can see that this frame froze up to the end of this video. Here it's unfrozen and here it froze. So NES thing which we want to do is to select the span tool just left mouse, click on it and scroll on your mouse. You can zoom in or zoom out from your picture. You can also hold spacebar to be able to leftmost click and drag like this your window. So for example, I could scroll in using will up on the mouse, then hold space and navigate your screen like this. So what do we want to do is to create a mask, start to create a new mask, you need just to select this footage with the police frame. And then leftmost leaf here on the edge of yourself. And create another point by clicking here, you can zoom in using scroll on the mouse. You can also middle click on the mouse on the scroller to be able to navigate also. So to create this curve to kind of point, you need to click and hold. Let me change the mass so it would be easier for you to see. I'm going to select this foolish and press M on keyboard to see mask. And I'm going to click here and change the color to maybe blue one like this and click Okay. So now we can see it better to continue our mask. We can just select our flourish once again by clicking on this one MP4 and then on one of the points on this last one, and then continue creating the mask. Just left mouse click, hold and drag to make these curved edges. I'm going to speed up this process. So I would not waste your time. And by the way, you don't need to be super accurate with this mask. And when you get to the edge, click here out of the window and just linked to this edge and continue creating your mask. And to end your mask, you need to close it. So as you can see, I've got to this point where I started. And once you'll get close like this, you can hover on this first which we created. And you can see on the cursor, you can see this circle, which means that you are going to close your mask. Just click on it. And it will close this mask. Once you've closed your mask, you can solo this layer by clicking here. And you can see that you already created your mask. And if you wouldn't close your mask once you click on solo, nothing will happen. So make sure that your flows your mask by clicking on this and you should be getting this result, which basically means that you've got out yourself out of the background. So our next step will be to select this pan behind tool, just like here. And with this pen behind tool, we can adjust position of this anchor point. You just need to find this anchor point leftmost click on it and move it here below our waste. And if you are using your own footage, make sure that it's out of the brain a little bit below. Just like this. Why we moved to this anchor point. For example, if I'm going to select this footage and press R on keyboard, I'm going to see rotation. And if I'll rotate my footage, you can see that it will rotate from this anchor point. And my case, I don't want to use rotation, so I'm going to set it to 0. We want to use scale. So to see our scale, you can select this foolish and press S on keyboard. And now if we will change the scale property, you can see that we can shrink ourselves down. I'm going to press Control Z to set it as it was. By the way, you can undo every step and after effects by pressing Control Z on keyboard. So now let's create animation like I'm shrinking down. For this, we want to create a keyframe which is basically clicking on this stopwatch, left mouse click on it, it turns to blue. Here you can see our first keeper, him. So what is key-frame? Key-frame is basically the point in time, we should remember is the value of certain property. So in our case, this keyframe is a point in time which is at eight seconds in 1903, it remembers this value of 100 and X and Y axis of this property scale. So if I'm going to move my cursor here up to the end, I can change this value to 0. Just click on any of these values and change to 0 and click Enter. It's made so small so we cannot see it. And as you can see, it created a new keyframe. And now I'm going to drag, click and drag to the left. By this time cursor, you can see that these values changes and we have animation. So take a look here. We can see that it's at 100. And once I'm going to scroll through, it will change to 0 value, which we've said it here, as a keyframe. So in this way, you can create animation and after effects by creating these keyframes which remembers the values which you have said. Now, I can just click here and change this work area. In this way, we can preview all the this part of the video is you can see we set boundaries of our work area here. And if I'm going to press 0 on numbered, it will preview this moment. And now we have our animation, but it doesn't look much exciting. And we can fix this kind of animation just by selecting this last keyframe. So let's click on this graph editor and make sure that if you click here on types of graph editors, you are setting it Edit Speed Graph. So you would have the same graph which I have here. So let's set it at edit speed with this last keyframe by clicking on this handle and drag into the left and up like this, we can change the animation speed. So our goal is to left-click and hold and drag to the left and up to this line above. So it will snap like this to it. And we have this nice curve. And this curve represents the speed between these keyframes. So it will start really fast, as you can see by this curve, and then it will slow down. So now if I'm going to press 0 not beds to preview this moment, you can see that we have really fast motion at the beginning. And it slows down by the end of this scaling, which is exactly what we want. And now let's exit this graph editor. And if you want to make this animation a little bit longer, you can just leftmost click on this last keyframe. Make sure that you have selected only this keyframe and not both of them. And just move to the right. And this way, we can extend this animation a bit longer. And if we will decrease this distance between these key frames, we will get much faster animation. In our case, we want to have animation a bit slower so you could see what's happening in our screen. If I'm going to press 0 numbered, we can see that this animation looks good. Let's un-solo this layer to see with our background. Let's click here and we can see our background. So now you can see that we have this cool animation. And what is cool with this video which I provided that this also includes the sound of shrinking down. So you can use your own footage and apply the sound which you see in this video. So let's press 0 numpad. And now as you can see, we have our starting point to this effect. And the next video I'm going to show you how you can add more complexity to this effect. So it would look much more exciting. See you in the next video. 3. Ghost Trailing Effect: Okay, Now we want to add more complexity to our effect. We want to leave a trail of ourselves. So it would look more like in the movie itself. We want to select this video on which we worked. We can also press Return or Enter on keyboard to be able to rename it. I'm going to call it me shrinking. And now we need to select this foolish and press Control D to duplicate it. And this one we can rename it also. Lets press Enter on keyboard to rename it, I'm gonna call it ghost trail and press Enter. And now we can apply a bunch of effects to it. First of all, we can click here on Toggle Switches to be able to see these modes. And let's change this mode to screen. So now our image got brighter, but we can make this look even more. We can go to effects and presets, wait for it to load and type here curves. Let's apply this curves effect under color correction. Leftmost click on it and drag it on. This goes trail. With this curves effect. We want to add more contrast to our image. Basically now what we are using all the screen mode, which allows us to overlay all the bright spots of our cells. So let's make ourselves brighter like this and decrease in the shadows. So you can just copy this curve, which basically will give more highlights into ourselves. And now you can see that we have two vibrant colors. So to change this, we can go to effects and presets and type here. And here under color correction, we can click on tenth and drag it here below curves. We can set it to 50 percent. So it would not be just black and white image. I think this looks good. And now what I want to do is to remove the scale animation because it follows the same scale animation which we've added to this mirror shrink and video originally. So make sure to set your time cursor at the beginning of this video and deselect this goes trail, press S on keyboard, and click here to remove all of these keyframes. You can just select them and press Delete on keyboard to delete them. Or just click here on stopwatch. And it also will delete all of these keyframes. So I'm going to press here. It deleted all keyframes. So now it's been seen my scale is set to 100, which is exactly what we want. And if we will scroll here in timeline, you can see that we have our highlights. So it's exactly as I've described with this screen mode, we aid in this ghost-like effect. And with this curves, we can adjust how much of our cells we can see. So now it's much more visual what we are doing with this curves, with aid in these highlights. And with this curve here, we make an invisible, the darkest part of ourselves. And if I'm going to click away here, you can see that we have a pretty cool effect, but it still stays on our screen and I want it to disappear. So for this, we want to go to the first frame of this video. Select this video goes trail and press T on keyboard. We will see our capacity. We can create a keyframe here at the beginning, which is 100%. And about here, we can set it to 0. So now we have this animation of fading out, and we can also control it how much it stays by these keyframes. If you will set this last keyframe here, it will fade out slower. And if we will set here, it will fade out quicker. You can also select these both keyframes just by left clicking and dragging to select both keyframes. And you can press F9 on keyboard. It will basically make this animation smoother. We can also increase this look just by selecting. This means shrinking and click on this toggle switches. So we could see this motion blur icon next to him is shrinking. We want to click here under this motion blur icon. To enable motion blur, you can see that it also enables here. Now you can see that we already capture equal effect, which we can add even more details to this trail. So I want to add a bit more details. I'm going to select this goes trail and press Control D to duplicate it. And this one, I want to rename it, press Enter to rename it. And I'm going to add word edges because we are going to make our edges more pronounced. So let's go to effects and presets and type, find edges effect, leftmost, click on it and drag it here below tint. We will click here on this checkbox. We will invert these colors. Now we are going to see all the edges. And by the way, make sure that you are in full if you want to see the final results because the auto mode can be a bit different from full. So set it to fall if you want to see the final result which you'll get after the render of this effect. So now you can see that we have more pronounced edges. Let's also add a bit more of these trailing effect. We can select this goes trail and press Control D to duplicate it. This one I want to make a bit smaller. So I can just press S on keyboard and change this value to smaller number. And now I can just left mouse click and drag. So to know exactly how much you want to move this second one, trail effect. You just want to disable this trail edges by clicking on this eyeball here. And this goes trail, which is first one. Maybe let's even move this up. So we can see it clearly here. So basically what we are doing, we are just picking the size of ourselves, which we like. For example, the size looks good. I'm just going to move this video to this point and adjust the size to fill it same as in this frame. Exactly the same. We can do one more time. We can just select it and press Control D to add another ghost trail and move it further. We can disable this. So we will see better our next trail, landscape few frames like here. Then drag this goes trail three to this moment, and press S on keyboard to see our scale and change it to fit it. This one as well. Just like this. By the way, you can just click on this value. So it will be highlighted and press down or up on keyboard to make it bigger or smaller to fit it, right? And, uh, maybe let's make another one, just here, the smallest one. So once again, you can just select this goes trail three. Press Control D to duplicate it, move it here. Press S on keyboard. Adjust the size to fit it with this one as well. Let's disable it to see it better. It looks fine to me. So now we can just close here, here and here and enable it. All of these layers, as you can see as I'm scrolling through, we can get this cool animation. Let's press is 0 numpad to see the preview. And it looks pretty cool, but I feel like it doesn't have something interesting at the beginning. And we are going to add a cherry on top on this effect and form a little flash at the beginning, which I'm going to show you in the next video. See you next video. 4. Adding Advanced Flash Effect: Okay, to make this effect even more interesting, we can add a bit of flesh at the beginning. So to create a Felicia the beginning I want to use this goes straight edges. You can just select it and press Control D to duplicate it. Let's place it on top like this. And we can even increase it to this moment here at the beginning. And for this flesh, I want to use an effect called CC best radial blur. So let's type it here. Cc radial fast blur, select it and drag it on. This goes trail edges. We can press Enter and keyboard to rename it. And let's just call it lash. As you can see, it's pretty fun effect. We can select it here and CC radial fast blur. And we can change this center. Just click here on this center. And now we can see where it was and we can change to our watch. So our blur will happen from center of ourselves. At this moment in time, our goals trails will appear. We want to set at highest value, which you can go. I'm going to set it to 85, which works for my footage. But you can play around with this value and see how much blur you want to add. In my case with this footage, 85 works. Great. So I'm going to use it. And I don't want to have any colors in this fast blur effect. So to get rid of the colors, we can go to a tent and change this amount to 100, which basically will make this flesh black and white. Then I want to animate this flesh. So I'm going to press here on an amount on the stopwatch to create a keyframe. We can select this flesh video and press U on keyboard. It will show us our keyframes which we already have. So what we can do, we can scroll a bit here few frames before and change this amount to 15. So we would have smaller radial fast blur and we want to change this capacity as well. We want to set it to 0 so it will fade in. And now we can just animate this CC Radial fast blur, 215 about here. So now we have this pretty cool flesh, but it's not that visible. To increase the visibility of this flesh, we can type here and effects in presets curves, drag it here below CC Radial test blur and create this kind of curve to make this flesh a lot more pronounced. So let's maybe add this kind of curve to it so it will pop more. So now we have this really cool pledge at the beginning and we are shrinking down. Let's press 0 numpad to preview this. As you can see now it looks much more exciting. And since we've filmed our flourish from tripod, we can adjust our camera movement. We can just select all of these videos and then parent them to this original video below. If you cannot see this parent, you just need to click on this toggle switches. You will see them. Or you can also write mostly here and enable it here from columns, Parent and Link. So let's click on one of them. And parents to this original video is you can see we've parent all of them to this one video, which basically means that now we can manipulate only this video and all of these properties of scale will adjust accordingly. So let me show you what I mean. Let's press S on keyboard to see our scale. Let's create a keyframe about here. And I want to have a bit of XOM here at the beginning. So it would look like It's zoom out. And as you remember, we can move this anchor point by clicking on this pan behind tool and set it to the center to ourselves. Let's maybe even move it a bit below like this. So once we will get smaller, we can zoom in using the scale just like this. And let's move it here to the end, this keyframe. And we can just select these keyframes and press F9 to make this animation smoother. We can also move this keyframe. This motion will start after me or shrinking down. And by tweaking these keyframes, we can add this fake cameras zoom in. So this is how I've made this first shot. So in the next video I'm going to show you how to shrink ourselves and this next shot. See you in the next video. 5. Practice Shot to Recap What We Learned: Okay, so now we've made this first part of the V0. Now we can move to this second part, just left mouse click on this second video and drag it to this icon here to create new composition. Now we've created a new composition and we need to make this effect once again. So it will be the great way for you to practice how to make this effect on your own. I'm going to explain it once again, but a lot faster. And you can just press pause and try to make this same kind of effect in this shot as well. And if you are not feeling comfortable to make this effect yet, you can just continue watching this video. So we would go through all of these steps together. So once again, for this kind of effect, you always need to film yourself and you need to fill your background just like this, and then stitch them together. Once again, I've set my camera on a tripod. I ran and jumped and then stitched with the video where I left the frame and we're left with this kind of video. Let's find the last moment where we can see ourselves. It's this moment, Control D to duplicate it and cut it to this moment right mouse click on it, go to time freeze frame. And once again, we want to create a mask. I'm not going to be super precise. And just to remind you how to make this effect from scratch. And if you remember, next step for us is to shrink down from this moment. So I upgraded my mask. Now I need to change this anchor point. With this point we are setting towards what object we want to shrink. In our previous video, we want to shrink to our waste. And this time I want to shrink myself here, I'm guessing that I'm going to land about here. So I'm going to place my anchor point here and we can select the selection tool. Just select this video, press S on keyboard to create a scale keyframe here at the beginning and just move it a bit further and set it as 0 as well. So now as you can see, we have this animation. We can also press R on keyboard to see our rotation. And here at the beginning, creating a keyframe. We can also press U on keyboard to see all of our keyframes and change the rotation. So to see how much of rotation I want to add, I'm going to place my cursor here and maybe rotate it to minus 20 degrees. And then just move this keyframe below this keyframe of scale. So it will be the same movement. And now we can just select these both deeper themes and press F9, which basically means that here it will start fest in here slower till the end. We can even tweak these keyframes a bit closer. So this animation will be a lot faster. And to see if animation looks good, we can just press 0 numpad to premium. Okay, it looks good. What you want to do is just to experiment with distance between these key frames to see what kind of animation looks best on your footage. And now what I want to do is to select this video, press Enter and call it to me. Then select this video and press Control D to duplicate this video. And let's call it me ghost, as we did before. And this time we will just pick the frame and not delete scale too soon to go to toggle switches and said to screen. And we can just go to this first composition and copy these effects. So we would not have to do it from scratch. Select one of them, press Shift, select the second one, press control C to copy them. Now let's go to this second composition, to this ghost and press Control V to paste. And now we can just press U on the keyboard. Remove this scale and rotation. Just make sure that you're tying cursor here. Because if you're going to remove your keyframes here, for example, like this, you'll have this phrase moment here. And it's not what you want. We want it to have here at the beginning. So I'm going to press Control Z to get these keeping his back. You want to be here at the first frame and then remote this animation. And now we want to change this curves. So we would have some highlights of our cells. Something like this should work fine. But the way to get rid of this sharp edges of your mask, you can just select your video, press F on keyboard, and change this mask feather to three. It will make this edges smoother. Or you can just click here once and then twice to open this mask expansion and change it this mask expansion to minus one or minus two, you will shrink the mask. So in my case, it works fine. I can just duplicate this. My, myself. Big this frame where I'm smaller, like this. Press U to remove the scale and rotation, which will freeze the animation as you can see, a change at the screen. Select this, MY ghost. Select these effects, control C to copy, control V to paste. And basically it's exactly the same as I did here. So once again, we will want to animate our opacity, make it 100 at the beginning and at the end, we will cut this second one, which is this one, because it will appear later. Let's Move it even above. And let's move this. So basically this how you can do the same effect and then just repeat all these steps which we made in the first video. And predefined part of this effect as gradient myself, really small and placing on this rail. And we will work on this final VFS shot in the next video. 6. Last VFX shot: In this final via PECS shot, we want to make ourselves small and place it on something small. And our shot, in my case, I'm going to place myself on this rail. And if you feel and do your own footage, you could place it yourself on table or wherever you filmed. So I am going to cut my layers just to this moment. So it would be organized like this. Now, let's work on this part. As you can see, I just feel this background. And also if I'm going to go to Project, you can see that I feel also this third video, Let's left mouse click and drag it to this icon to create new composition. So for this effect, I didn't use any green screen as a promised in preview. And now I'm going to show you how you can do the same and get pretty decent results for this effect. So what you can do if you don't have any green stream with the green-screen would be easier to cut yourself. But if you don't have any green-screen, you can just feel yourself from tribal for this technique which we are going to use, it's really crucial that your cameras should not move. You can run towards the camera and just like this and make sure that nothing in your scene doesn't change. You don't want to have some people walking around or some cars passing by, because only thing which you want to use is yourself against the completely static background event, the light in your scene should not move. As you can see between me running here and here where I left the frame to fill in all the background. Nothing changed. And now I'm going to show you why it's important, because we are going to use this difference matt technique here and effects in presets just type different SMED. But before we are going to apply this effect, I want to freeze frame this background. Here. When I left the frame, I'm going to press Control Shift D to split this layer. And then right mouse click on this one and go to time freeze frame. And we can extend this video to the beginning. In this way, we have all the background. Let's set it to here below. And now we can apply this difference met to this video where we are running. So let's select it and place it on this video. We disappeared. It's only because we didn't set the difference layer for this difference met technique. So let's add this difference layer. Let's edit this video below, which is our background. And to see it better, I'm going to solo this layer, which is layer with ourselves. And we can see that we've cut out ourselves. Let me explain how this effect works. So you wouldn't be able easier to change these values and understanding better how this effect works. Basically, this effect looks at our flourish with ourselves and with this difference layer, we are talent to this defect, to look at this layer which is background. So if I'm going to press it and rename it to BG for background. We can see that we've said it, our background to this effect. And now it looks at this layer with ourselves and with our background and tries to see what is different. And only because only thing which is different between these both videos is myself. It will leave all this different spot. Basically, this is why it's difference met. So this is why it's really important that nothing is changes in your background because it will mess up this difference met technique. To tweak this effect even more, we can change this mesh and tolerance to about seven. To bring back some of the details, we can even change this blur before difference to adjust the edges. As you can see now it looks much better. I've said it, my value to two, but you can play around with this first value in this last value to get more of yourself and less of the background. We can also add matte choker. Let's place it here below. And as you can see, just by applying this effect and not changing anything, you can cut out the most of garbage from your background and took out even more. You can just click here on this mask. Just got it like this. So you would see all yourself in this shot. So this is basically how you can cut out yourself without using any green screen. And it's okay that it's not perfect because we are going to shrink ourselves to really small size and these imperfections will not be that visible. So in the next video, we are going to compose this video with this footage. See you in the next video. 7. Finalizing the Look: Okay, so let's cut this video to this part where we can see our cells right mouse click and click on trim, come to work area. And now let's go to this second video and we can go to Project and place this third video into our second composition, which is basically with our background. And now you can see that we can successfully put herself on top of this rail. We can just press S on keyboard to make the size smaller. And what you want to keep in mind, this shadow should be on top of the rail or wherever you are using it just by playing with the size and a play in with the placement, you can get really convincing result. And by the way, and some parts like here, you can see that apart of shadow falls off of the rail. You can just simply cut it like this. And press M on keyboard and said this mask to subtract, it will cut this edge in here as well. You can just select with the selection tool, extend this mask, and clean up this part. Just make sure that your mask doesn't go on top of you. And by the way, for better transition from this shot where I'm getting smaller or from this shot where I'm getting smaller, it's really good idea to add ledge here at the beginning. So we can just duplicate this layer, select it and press Control D. Go to this first one, use this flesh one. Just select first effect, press Shift on keyboard. Scroll down, hold shift on keyboard, and select the last one to copy all of this and press control C to copy. And let's go to this second video. So this video, it's important to set your time cursor here at the beginning and press control V is important because all animation will start from your placement of your time coarser. So for example, if I'm going to press U on the keyboard, you can see that my animation starts exactly here. So now I can just select this animation and drag it to the left and just make sure that your render fast blur. The center is set to center of yourself. So you can just select this radial blur and change the center here to our cells. And once again, we can set this mode to screen. And by tweaking these curves. We can also delete this curve. And just by manipulating only this curve, we can set how much of the globe you can add here at the beginning. And even with this kind of weird curve, you can get this pretty cool effect for our transition. We can spread this transition a bit more. And we can also press T on keyboard and create a basicity keeping gear I set to 100. So I'm going to set it to beginning. And here I'm going to set to 0, move it a bit to the right. So I'm going to press U on the keyboard to see both of my keyframes. I'm going to select them and press F9 to make this animation smoother. And now we can see this fade-in an animation. And basically this is how you can get this political transition point. So I really recommend to use this transition point, which will help to blend these kind of effects batter into your final video, which is exactly what they did NPV o to this class. Follow me here on Skillshare if you want to learn more fun VFS, which I've created here, as you can see, I have a bunch of classes. And this one is really cool because it takes all the 12 minutes and you'll get this awesome looking result at the end. But also feel free to check other of my classes. I am posting new VFS class every week. Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.