Create Holograms in Adobe After Effects

1. Introduction: Hey guys, Welcome to another super exciting Skillshare class where today you're going to learn how to make this super cool hologram effect. We're going to cover things like prepping your footage with tracking and roto, applying effect to make it look like a hologram. And adding some other post-processing effects and filters to really finish off the look. I'm super excited for you guys to learn how to do this effect. And I really can't wait to see what kind of results you'll get with it. So let's jump right in. 2. Tracking + Rotoscope: I'm so excited that you guys are gonna learn this. In this part, we're gonna cover roto tracking and prepping your footage. Let's jump into After Effects. If you're starting off here with a brand new, fresh project and we have two assets. I'm gonna take these and drop them in. You can find these in the description. I have these clips ready for you so you can try them out. The two clips that we have here is this stock footage that I downloaded from Pexels. People looking on their phones. It's got this Black Mirror vibe, pretty cinematic. And the idea here is that we're going to add the hologram to this phone. And we're gonna make sure that it's behind the phone, kind of floating in the air with some cool filters. We're not even going to use the whole 42 seconds. You're just going to use the first ten. Then we have some stock footage right here, also from Pexels of just somebody on a green screen. Let's take our main footage here, drop it into a new composition. Perfect. And I'm going to rename this combo, combo, this comp, by clicking on it, hitting Enter, and just typing in master comp. Perfect. I'm going to start organizing this because it could get a little messy. I'm gonna make a new folder called master comps. Are we gonna take this master competent, bring it in. And to prep for our hologram, I'm gonna make a new folder called precomps. We're going to have a couple of these. I'm going to make a new composition. And it's going to be vertical because it's pretending to be a phone. So it's gonna be 1080 by 1920. So vertical. Ten seconds, Let's hit. Okay, perfect. Let's name this comp phone screen with effects. And you'll see why. Once we apply the effects on, we're going to make another folder called assets. We're going to take or to videos and just drop them in there so you can stay nice and organized. In the phone screen with Effects. I'm going to right-click where you can go up to Layer New Solid. We're just gonna make a red solid for now, just so we can get the general idea of where our phone is going to be. Let's go to master comp and take a look at the length in the preview video as you saw. Only use it to the point where the hair goes past the phone. Like this should be pretty good. We're going to take this, drag it over. Right-click on the composition here and do trim comp to work area. And it's basically just limits the amount of preview we have in the timeline. Next step is we're gonna need to track the phone so we can put the UI in it. So all you need to do, select your footage. Go to animation, track with Boris Effects mocha. This is going to pull up mocha. Make sure your resolution is set to full so that you get the full resolution when you're bringing it in to moca. And all you have to do is click this Moka button. This is going to pull up this footage, the footage and the UI. You can just hit Start, asks any questions. You can just hit Skip a million times. So the idea is, I only want to track the position. I don't care about rotation, scale, size, perspective, any of that. So all I need are just these two cameras here. I'm going to go here into the pen tool or the spine tool. And I'm just going to surround this little area. The reason I want to do mocha instead of the normal tracker, if you want to learn how to track footage, we have a whole other video for it covers every type of tracking. But the reason I want to do it is because sometimes when the hair is overlapping, when it's moving, I just want to get a little bit more frames. And you'll see why. Once I pick this out, all you have to do is just hit Next and it's going to track it for you. So as you can see, we only got this far, which is fine because I'll be just need is the position and the rest VR gonna imagine. All you need to do now is just save. If you're on a Mac, you can just do Command S. If you're on PC, you could do control us and you can just close the moca window. Next you're gonna right-click into our into our copier, go to New Null Object. And you can rename this by pressing Enter. And I'm going to call this track. Once you click on your footage in effects in mocha, you're going to drop down this tracking data. You're gonna hit Create Track data. And it's just gonna be called layer one since there's only one mask thing that we were tracking. And you can see just chooses that area. And instead of Corner Pin option, we're gonna do transform. And we're going to choose the track. Basically Corner Pin. It would add like a planar track where the transform, it's only position and rotation and scale and things like that. Here we are selecting the track that you want to apply to. You can hit apply Export. If you click on your track, you see that there's going to be key frames here that are showing up. And I'm just going to hit U on the keyboard, which pulls up all of your keyframes. You can also just drop down this little triangle window. And I'm going to uncheck scale, and I'm going to uncheck rotation. And a great visual way to see what your keyframes are doing is if you click on the position, there's this little chart here which is going to show you the graph. You can see here what's happening to the exposition because it's moving across. And then you can see the Y position if you want a little bit of control over it, because once the hair goes over the frame here, you see nothing, nothing happens. So I'm going to press this which separates the dimensions. It's going to separate the x and y. And if you're working in 3D space will also separate the z. And this gives you a bit more control. So now you can see it separates the X and the Y separately. You can really see what's happening with y and with x. I'm all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna zoom in until where the hair starts intersecting. So right about here. And I'm just going to take all these extra keyframes and I'm going to delete them. Now if you zoom out, you can kinda see that it's pretty much almost like a straight line all the way throughout. So I'm just going to go to the end. I'm going to start dragging the number down and you see it's giving you an extra line here. And you can just take these little handles and just stretch it out. So now you can kind of see it continues to motion. If the video kept going, this is probably what would happen if you're looking at the track and you see the phone here, you're going to after our keyframes are done, It's still kind of following that same motion. That's perfect. That's exactly what we need. We're gonna do the same thing for the y. Actually, we don't even need to touch the white because it's it's pretty stable motion, nothing too crazy. But depending on your foot is that you're working with and something is crossing it. You can do something like that, similar sort. That's perfect. We have that. We have our track completed. And the next step is we're going to use little cheat sheet. And we're gonna do a similar thing with the phone. So all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a new solid and I'm just gonna make it red Comp Size. I'm going to hit T on the keyboard to pull up opacity. Or once again, if you just drop it down, you could see it. And I'll set the opacity to 50. Now we're gonna use this little whip tool or you can just press it down and we're going to select track. And what that's going to happen is going to track or whole gigantic red square to the footage. Now I'm gonna take my pen tool, select the solid. I'm going to enable auto bezier. It makes curves automatic. And I'm just going to go over here and just outline the phone silhouette. I really loved using the roadshow Bezier tool because I never have to make curves, makes it so easy. Perfect. Now you can see we have our phone outline animals and they make it a little bit more perfect. Great. That looks pretty good. In the masks. I'm going to hit Mask Path. Great. I'm going to maybe set the feather little bit higher just because you can see that it's not perfect. There we go, three pixels works. I'm gonna also key-frame the feather. And all we're gonna do is you're gonna go through the video. You can see here I just moved like three seconds in. I'm just going to adjust the mask so I can just select these, drag it up. We'll probably make a full rotoscoping course for you. At some point. You guys would be able to really learn how to rotoscoping things really well. That's going to be a fun one here. I'm just doing pretty general rough idea. We're gonna keep going farther and just adjust some of these. And I'm just going to fast-forward to this section so you can kind of get the idea of what's happening with the row. The row is pretty, pretty much done. And all I want to do is just animate the feathers since the video does go out of focus because it's changing the focus to somebody else. Here. I'm just going to leave a keyframe and I'm going to go through to where it gets blurred. You see it to focuses on this person. And I'm just going to crank this number up until I think it matches with about ten by ten. Looks good. Perfect, Great. So now we have the row of the phone and all we need to do now is just bring the opacity to 100. I'm going to duplicate the original. I'm going to bring it right under the solid and let's start renaming things to stay organized. We're going to rename the solid to Alpha Matte. Let's put phone in front of it. Phone alpha matte or background is going to be BG. This is going to be phone, wrote them. All we have to do is you're gonna have to go to Track Matte and select Alpha Matte. It might not look like anything. And then also if you can't find this, you see how it says layer name, mode, Track, Matte, parent and link. If you just right-click on it, you can actually see which columns you see. You can just open it up. Or you can also hit toggle switches and modes because sometimes it's hidden under there. But the idea is, if I now take a new layer or even better, go to our pre-comps, take our phone screen with effect and put it right under the phone row. Let's scale this down to about the size of a phone screen. Something like this could be pretty, pretty good. You can see it's now sticking behind the phone screen. Look at that. Isn't that beautiful? If you take the same phone screen with effects and just once again connected to the track, you will see that is being tracked to the phone. Not too crazy, and it's already getting us to the right place. So don't forget to save your project. Always good to save. And we pretty much got this part down. The next step is you could pretty much continue and do the same thing by rotating this person in front with the same idea. You can either track the face and just move the mask, or you can use the otoscope tool. I just don't want to waste time on this tutorial. You can find our own tutorials for tracking and roto. Because here you're going to focus on the hologram. In the next section of this course, you're gonna find how VR gonna be working with this video to key it and start giving it this hologram look. Great. You've got the basics prepped for the next steps. In the next steps, you're going to learn how to apply the effects, some stuff and really finish off the look. 3. Making the Hologram Look: Now that you've got some of those basics out of the way, let's jump into the fun stuff where you really get the effect. In this part, we're gonna learn how to key and start adding the filters together. All we need to do is take or video. Open up our phone screen with effects. And right here we just have the red. You can turn that off for now and drag the video in. I'm going to want to scale it down just a bit because she does move her hands and the hands to be in the frame. So I'm going to bring this down a bit. And this part is pretty simple. You're going to want to go to effects and presets. Takes a second to load and you're going to type in key light. There you go, drag it in, click on the screen color, and choose the green. Now, might look good already, but you don't really know until you go to Screen Matte. So instead of final result, click Screen Matte. Here it gives you e black and white version of the footage. So black is obviously not visible and weight is visible. And as you can see, there's a little vignette just because the green screens are never perfectly lit. And all you have to do is go into the Screen Matte section and do Clip Black. Perfect. And then you see there's some gray. I don't know if you'll be able to see from the video compression, but you can take the clip white and bring it down, and now it's fully solid. Let's go to final result. Perfect. This is looking really good. Next, we're gonna make sure that nothing is selected. And I'm just going to go to my rectangle tool. And I'm just going to double-click it, which is going to fill the screen. But all I want is the stroke. So I'm going to click on the filtText and choose none. Great. Then under stroke, Let's go ahead and make the stroke 25. And under the rectangle path, bringing us start bringing it down. Somewhere here is pretty good. I'm just gonna uncheck it. And just so I can control the height separately. Then in the contents, I'm also going to add rounded corners because I want to start making it look like those new phone screens because they have rounded corners. I'm just going to bring it up a bit. That looks good. This is gonna give us that phone look. Now the next idea is I want to bring this even smaller because I want her hand to start sticking outside of it. I'm going to take this shape, bring it to the bottom. I'm going to take this video, drop it down. That looks good. Now we have the girl at the bottom of the screen. She's keyed. Everything is looking perfect. Now let's add some little elements. I mean, this is all up to you. You can make it anything you want. I'm going to make this personal assists assist tent. Hopefully I spelled that correctly. I'm just going to select it all. Make it a bit smaller. Bring this text closer and align it. This is looking pretty good. It might scale down this whole thing a little bit. Great. Assistant. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I spelled that correctly. Then I'm just going to duplicate it by hitting Control D or Command D, bringing it down. Changing the paragraph because I want this text. Which paragraph? Paragraph b on the left side. I'm just going to start typing a bunch of numbers. Literally just spamming the keyboard. Let's do four rows. Four rows could look pretty good. I'm going to start scaling it down, just smaller. I'm going to try to align it a little bit better. And let's also make the gap in the text a bit less. This one has got too many numbers. Let's just get rid of some. Let's add a couple of here. And perfect. What I want to do with this text is animated. Make it look cool. So all I have to do is down. Choose text. Animate. Just kidding. Just getting again. Yes, that is correct. And we're gonna do character offset. You can see there's a character offset option here. And I'm just going to click the stopwatch. Go to the end of our ten seconds and I'm just going to drag it to something like, I don't know, 170. If you play it back, you see that all the texts is just randomly changing and animate it one more time. I'm going to go into our effects and presets and type in typewriter. All I have to do is take the typewriter, drag it on, hit U on the keyboard to see our keyframes and stretch it out a little bit. And when you play it, you can see it's going to start typing the numbers and there'll be moving and she'll be moving. Everything will be moving. And I'm just going to add one more moving element to make it a really snazzy and cool. And it's a little moving border. And this one's really easy because we already have a border ready. I'm just going to duplicate it. I'm going to call this moving dots. Let's open it up. Go to contents rectangle, rectangle path. And I'm going to scale it down a bit. And I want to uncheck this just so I can have a little bit more control over the size. And under stroke. I don't want it to be as thick. So maybe let's do 1515. Looks good. And then under the add button, we're going to choose just getting under the stroke. You have an option here. Dashes. You're just going to hit Plus. And you can see it adds dashes. I'm gonna change it to 15 just so they're a bit bigger. Maybe even 2020 looks pretty cool. And we're going to click the keyframe next to offset, go to the end. And we're just going to move it in whatever direction to be like that, once you play it. You can see the dashes are running across the screen. You can see here that there's this weird section where the dashes start and end. You're going to notice it in a second. There you go. That's not gonna matter from this faraway. I mean, if you're a perfectionist, you can try to fix it up and do whatever you want. But for me, I think that looks fine, especially once you see all the things on the screen and all these random elements look pretty cool. One thing is the Texas touching it. Now, I'm just going to go ahead and fix that in the character. We can just do a little bit smaller and move it over just a little bit. We can even be perfect here and just align it to the center. This looks great. Now a good step would be to start adding the filters. This is why it's called phone screen with effects. We're going to go hit Control a to select everything. You can also do command a if you're on a Mac, right-click pre-compose. And I can call this phone pre comp, no effect. And hit. Okay. This is the fun part. This is where we're gonna stylize it to look like a digital holograms. In the Effects and Presets, we're going to type in tint. This is going to tint the whole video we've seen. Because for some reason everything's blue. We're keeping it wide here. We're going to choose our color. Make it this bright blue. Once he actually added into the comp, it's going to be much cooler looking and you'll see that. Next we're going to type in a CC ball action. This is a very, very underused effect. People really don't use it and I think you can really stylize some things with it, especially like digital screens and things like that. Right now it's looking pretty weird. And that's because our grid spacing is five. So I'm going to set it to two. I think two looks pretty good and you see it literally looks like pixels. Especially if you zoom in, it really looks like pixels. That's very cool. You can make it one. But I think since it in this main comp here with our footage, it doesn't really look too pixelated from this faraway. I'm going to change it to two. You can go back to the master comp and you can see this looks a bit more pixelated, little more cooler. You can also make it three. That gives it even more of that weird digital hologram you look. So I can keep it at, I'll keep it at three for this. You can also decrease the gap by changing the ball size. So if you set something like 70. You can see now that there's a bit more gaps between the text, so that makes it look cool. But that's the idea for this. And then let's go into this precomp and let's add some glitching effects. Let's save once again just in case you're going to right-click go New Adjustment Layer. And let's call this glitch perfect. And under effects and presets, you're gonna choose TRB, you lint displace, and you're gonna apply it. This is this is not what we're looking for. But after your name did glitch, we're gonna go into the effects and presets and type in displace. And we're gonna find that displacement map and apply it. Right now it might look really weird. And that's because it's automatically shifting the pixels 55 from nothing. We're gonna change red to luminance. And same thing for vertical and horizontal. And we're gonna set these to 0 for now. We don't want to mess with it yet. We're gonna right-click, make a new solid. And we're going to call this noise for glitch. And this is what's going to control our glitch. So under effects and presets, you can type a noise. And let's just go ahead and get fractal noise. Basically, in the glitch, you see IV haven't set to luminance. The white and the black on this noise for glitch. The fractal noise is going to affect where our pixels Shift. Because I wanted to look pretty blocky. I'm going to go and I'm gonna choose threads. Because you see here it gives you pretty violent and looking effect. And I'm going to drag it and just play around with these settings to where it looks really contrasted looking because we want the areas to be affected very wild wildly. Next in the evolution, I'm going to hold Option or Alt while clicking on the stopwatch. And this is going to let me write an expression because I don't want to put a keyframe on here. I just want to make it simple and type in time. Which is a frame. For one frame it would be like 11 motion, so like one degree. So I'm just gonna do time times. Let's do 116. For every frame. It's going to move 116. Whatever, I guess it's not 100% accurate, but if you play it, you see that it's moving a lot. Now if the hide the noise for glitch and you go to glitch, they actually use our noise for glitch as the displacement. And we want to make sure it's not just source, but it's using the effects and masks as well. And you start dragging the horizontal displacement. You can really see that it starts glitching your footage here. Looks very cool. All I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set it to 0. Hold Option, click on max horizontal displacement. And we're going to use a wiggle expression because we wanted to look like the connection is interrupting, like it's random. I'm gonna type in wiggle. And let's do three comma five forever. The first number is the frequency, the next number is the amount. Maybe five isn't even enough. So let's take a look. Yeah, So if you want the increases, let's do 15. This is looking at bit better. Look at that, especially at the numbers over here. You can see it's getting displaced, but let's make it even more extreme. They're in a bad connection area. Check this out. There's too many people on their phones. They're getting really bad connection. Now you can see here it's glitching and both directions it's going while it's going nuts. You play it back. Wow, yeah, The connection is really glitching. Oh my God, I'm sorry. I'm going through a tunnel. Let's go to our full-screen with effects and you see the glitch gets applied with the CC ball action on it. So very cool. Let's set this back to two just so we can see how it looks with that. A little extra detail. Yeah, look at that. We getting these cool glitching effects left and right. We're getting this weird, weird morphing. It's looking pretty cool overall. That's looking nice. Let's have it on this cool frame here. And let's go into our master comp and let's start seeing what it looks like. Right now. It's just looking like blue footage. It's not interacting with our background in any way. In order to do that, we're just going to change your blending mode to screen. Now it's transparent, it's looking cool. This is where the fun part begins. One of the things we wanna do first is start blending it with the footage. You see the phone is a little bit out of focus. So I'm just going to go for our phone alpha matte that we had here with the Key framed feather. I'm just going to hit you. And you can see I have the feather mask here. This is where we can really tell where the blur ends because we needed to blur our phone row. Here you can see it's really blurry bought our screen is still very sharp. Under the phone screen with Effects. I'm going to go to camera. I'm just gonna choose camera lens blur and apply it on. If I zoom in, I'm just gonna keep cranking this number up until, yeah, I think this looks great. And I'm gonna hit keyframe. And then I'm gonna go to where it starts, which I'm pretty sure it's here. Yeah. So it's still kind of in focus here. And I think I could set it to something like five. Yeah. That's looking pretty good. You can see without it, with it. You're getting that little blur that matches it with the camera. Perfect. Then just to make the keyframe smoother, I'm going to select both of them by hitting you, Right? Selecting both of them, right-clicking on the keyframe, going to keyframe assistant, easy, ease. And it's just gonna make the keyframe once again, if you use our little graph tool to take a look, you can see it makes it smooth. Perfect. Now, time to make it look really, really dope. All we need to do is duplicate by hitting Control D or Command D. You can see already just by duplicating it. It's making it brighter. But we want it to glow. Let's change from screen to add, which is adding the brightness values together. And under effects and presets, we're going to look up fast blur because we want to render this fast. We're not waiting for any of those render times. Let's heat. Let's hit Repeat Edge Pixels. And let's blur this, bringing it up a little bit. Something like six is looking pretty good right now. And I'm going to hit T with the function green selected with effects and do 90 and it enter. One other thing that I'm gonna do is I'm going to parenthood from the track and I'm going to connect it back to the phone screen with effects. And the reason is once we make a bunch of duplicates of this, once you move the phone, it will move all the glowing pieces with it. If you don't like where it's placed, you don't have to move each one individually and keep reduplicating things. You can just have them all connected to this main phone and you can place it to the side. Let's say the producer says, I don't like how it's on top of it. Move it to the left, move it to the right. You can do it and it's still hiding behind the phone. Because if you wrote it, this is pretty cool. You can even have it up to the side here just for the sake of this tutorial to make it like really dope. Now let's duplicate it one more time. Now if we hit T and let's reduce the opacity to, let's say 70. And let's blur it a little bit more. Now you're seeing that we're adding this cool glow effect to it, then you can just stack that again, duplicate that, reduce the opacity to 50 and blurred even more. Once again, all these numbers that I'm using, you don't have to be exactly like me. You can play around. It's all for you to experiment with it. Look at how cool of this glowing effect we're already achieving. And now just one more time, let's go and hit Control D T. And let's do 30. Let's expand it. Now one thing that you might notice is we are getting this weird edge bleed. That's because it's going past past our comp. We can just toggle switches and modes and hit this COG wheel, which basically expands your composition from the inside because we are limited to the vertical 1080 by 1920. You can do that for all of them. And you could see, wow, this is really changing the way it looks. Very cool. You see it's glowing into the atmosphere. Little extra step that we could do to help with the realism. Because this is looking pretty cool. This is looking pretty cool. And let's go and see how it looks like when it's blurred. I bet it's going to look at me and sick. You need more sick. Yeah, look at that. Wow, very cool hologram. Now to make it blend in even more, we could do is we could just solo or background layer. You can make a new adjustment layer. And let's call this phase glow. We can take this face glow. You can put it right above our background. And you can go here. Let's go to curves. Let's take a curves, place it on it. Let's go into the blue channel. What you're going to notice is when you start bringing it up and stretch, making everything blue. And you want to mostly affect the highlights. You can take the top part of the image and start really bringing it up. You can see that it with it. The next thing is we're going to connect it to a track. Then we're going to use a mask. And let's mask for face. Mask or face here. You don't have to be too accurate. The great thing is we could do multiple different masks. Let's get this one. Full, full face. And we're gonna go, and we're just going to blur it, the feather, the edges by eight pixels. Then we can go in with a second mask. Bam. We can actually mask too. There we go. Subtract. Now if you're subtracting it. So only lighting half the face and we can feather it. Look at that. Our hologram is on the left side. Face is going to light up on the left side. Now when you get rid of that. And we take a look, cool, except it's not looking as blue as we wanted to. So you can go back into the phase glow. We can start maybe going into the RGB channel and bringing in some of the brightness. Then we can go back into the blue channel. Like really extending the blues out. Or you can even go ahead and type in tint. Tint it bright blue. This is more of this would be a little bit more experimental and you can just not go the full amount. You just ended a bit like 50%. Maybe you can even go with the mask and really, really extended out. Make it like contour the face a bit. Maybe not affect the hair as much. There we go. Look at that. We got blue lighting on the face here. You can experiment with it. You can, for instance, make only the bottom part of the face glow. We can even go in and bring an exposure before the tint, expose it up a bit. So it's like a little brighter. Very interesting. I'm probably going to tint it a bit less. We don't want to go overboard with the effects here. You can see everyone's got normally bright faces from the phones. And you got a bit of a blue phase here from the hologram. Good thing that the moved it because now I want to bring it to the center here. Cool, This is looking great. Then the next step that you could do after saving, of course, is just applying motion blur to all of this. When the camera's moving and everything is moving, you've got motion blur. That is that is that is it. You've pretty much learn how to do a hologram. You can mix and match it with a million different effects. You could try lots of things. You can download different little elements. You can make your own little UI hologram elements, but this is the way you can stylize it and make it glow and interact with your environment. You've got the foreground, you've got the background, you've got the actual hologram. Go ahead and play around, use the videos that I've provided that I've just downloaded from Pexels that are in the project. Play around. I'd love to see what you can do. Congrats. Now you know how to make holograms, go make the next Star Wars. 4. Conclusion & Assignment: I'm so glad you guys were able to go through the whole way and really learn how to prep your footage, how to apply those effects. And now I can't wait to see what you can do with it. I've gotten some example files ready for you. The two clips that I've used in this example. So you can follow along. You can try those, or you can use your own footage if you'd like. So make sure to submit something. I would love to see what you guys can do. And I leave my comments on it. So thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys in another what am I super fun classes.