Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Jake and today we are going to make this effect. As you can see, it's following me around. The best part of this effect, that you can apply to any footage. It's not a problem if you don't have any experience. I invite you to learn Adobe After Effects with me. I'll be taking you through all the basics which you need to know to create videos like these. I think it's the best way to learn new software, while creating something for fun. In the next 30 minutes, you'll learn everything you need to know to apply this effect to any video. Once you learn this technique, it will literally take you only five minutes to apply this effect to any of your footage. I'll walk you through step-by-step, explaining every click which I make and why we are using certain tools. You'll be surprised how much you can do with this software. Follow me here on Skillshare to check my future classes on using Adobe After Effects and create fun V effects with me. Let's get started.
2. Cutting Ourself Out: I'm using Adobe After Effects 2021, but you can pretty much use any version which you have. Also, I'm using standard layout. You can click here and your layout should be similar to mine. If you cannot see any of these panels which you can see on my screen, you can go to Window and enable it from here. For example, Character, Character. Let's import our footage. You can double-click here or go to File, Import File. This footage will be provided in research step to this class. Select it and click "Import". To create new composition, we need to left mouse click and drag it here, or here on timeline, or here on this icon to create new composition. Now let's take a look what we want to have as a result. We want to have this kind of map. Then we will be applying on real live footage. To create this map, we need to isolate ourselves from background. To isolate ourselves from background, we need to select our footage and click here to use the Roto Brush Tool. But first of all, I want to cut this clip from this moment, so we would work only on this part of the area. We can left mouse click and drag to this moment, and release it, then write mouse click here, and Trim Comp to Work Area, which basically means that we want to work only in this part. Let's select our footage. You need just to select this footage and left mouse double-click on it. Just double-click on it and it will open a new layer mode. As you can see, we have composition mode and this layer mode. We need to open our footage in layer mode because we are going to use Roto Brush Tool and this tool works only in layer mode. Let's click on it. As you can see, my cursor now is turned to green. We can click Control and hold. As you can see, I'm clicking Control and holding or Command on Mac. Left mouse click hold and drag to the left or to the right to change the brush size. I've made my brush size bigger and now I can just left mouse click without holding Control this time, just left mouse click and drag to select ourselves. Now as you can see, we've select our ourselves but also this part of the door. We can deselect this part by holding Alt key on keyboard. Now I'm just left mouse click on it and drag it here to deselect this part and release it. Now we have a better mask of ourselves but once we release the Alt key, we can also add a bit of ourselves. With this process, we need to make sure that we are selecting ourselves properly. Here on the first frame, we've created our mask and now we can just frame by frame click here and make sure that our mask stays on us. If you see that mask is going out, you can edit with our Roto Brush Tool. In my case, I don't want to be super precise so I'm going to click on play. Now as you can see, this process works a bit faster but it can lose some points of us. You can at any point, click here to stop and add a bit more of hair or what you want to add. I don't want to spend too much time on cutting the hair, so I'm going to work with the arithmetic result which I'll have. But you can have spend a little bit more time if you want to have a precise mask on yourself. Once this process is complete, you can see by this green bar here, you need to click on this freeze button. It will bake in all of these values of your mask into your footage. Only after this step, you can save your project and it will remember your mask. Otherwise, it will not remember all of your mask which you created. Now we have saved our mask and as you can see, we cannot use Roto Brush Tool anymore because we've clicked on this freeze button and now we can come back to this composition mode. If we cut out our cells from the background, it's not perfect but for this effect, it will do fine. To speed up our future workflow, we can go to Composition, Add to Render Queue. Here, click on Lossless and choose this QuickTime. As also in channels RGB plus Alpha, and click "OK". Here, you need to specify where you want to save your file. If you have a slow computer, you might want to do the step and click render because in this way, you'll have only yourself cut out and this effect will not draw too much power from your computer. But in my case, it seems to work pretty fast, so I'm not going to render myself out. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to apply this matrix coat on top of ourselves. See you in the next video.
3. Creating Code Map: Now we have ourselves cutout. What we can do is to select this footage and go to Layer, Pre-compose and let's call it matte clear. Because in the future we are going to use this as a matte to our effect, and I'll explain more later in this video. Now we need to click here on Move all attributes. Basically it means that all effects which we have on top of this layer will be inside our composition. Let's click "Okay". Now, if we will go to Effect Controls you can see that we don't have any effects here. By the way, if you cannot see this Effect Controls, you can go to Window, Effect Controls and you'll be able to see this panel. As you can see it doesn't have our RotoBrush Tool effect and if we will open this composition, by the way, if you click just like this, it will open Layer mode because we didn't select our selection tool. So make sure that if you want to open your composition, that you have picked your selection tool. Let's open it, left double mouse click on it. As you can see, we still have this video with this effect on top of it. Let's go back to our test footage and let's rename this composition so it would be more organized. Just right mouse click here and go to Composition Settings. Here we can rename this composition to Final Effect and click "Okay." Let's go to the fun part. We are going to apply this matrix code on top of ourselves. First of all, we need to create new solid. Go to Layer, New, Solid. Let's choose black color and click "Okay", and click here on Make Comp Size. It will repeat your resolution of your video. Let's call it Matrix Code and click "Okay". Now we have this layer on top and we want to go to Effects and Presets. Here we need to search for the effect which called Particle Playground. Just left mouse click on it and drag and drop onto your solid. Now, if I'm going to click on this solo button, which will show us only our layer, this matrix code layer. We can see that this particle playground already working. Basically, it's particle system which generates particles. But in our case, we don't want to use this Canon mode which creates these particles, we want to use this Grid mode. To disable this Canon mode, all you need to do is to go to Particles Per Second and set it to zero. As you can see, we've disabled this effect and now we can just close it this Canon and here in Grid, we want to type our dimensions of our composition. To check your dimensions, you just need to right mouse click on it and go to Composition Settings. As you can see, we have this 1920 by 1080. Let's type these values, 1920 by 1080. Basically, it will create a grid of particles to this exact resolution. To see our particles, we need to set particles across and particles down. Let's set a number of particles to 100 and particles down to 40. As you can see, I've set it pretty high values, so it needs time to think. This is basically our stripes of particles which will represent our code which has fallen down. You can play around with these values. For example, you can change this particles across to a value like 70. Now as you can see, we have a bigger gaps between them. In our case, we want to have a pretty tight space and particle down, if we will set to two. You can also see that we have only two stripes. We want to have a bit higher number. But now we have a task. How to change these lines from lines to our code? We can change it here by clicking on this Options button. As you remember, we've disabled this Canon part, so we need to use our Edit Grid Text because we are using this grid module of this effect. Let's go to Edit Grid Text. Here we can type whatever we want, things like text and here change fonts to whichever you want, and make sure to click here on Use Grid, because it will apply to this effect which we've created and also Loop Text. It will repeat this text across our stream and we don't have to type it over and over again to fill all of our stream. Let's see how it works. Let's type text and click "Okay". Here let's click "Okay". It takes time to think. Now as you can see, we don't really have too much difference because we need to change our font size. Let's try to change to 25. Now if you look closely, we already can see some difference here. First of all, you can see outline of our texts and it's repeating itself a bunch of times. At this point, you might think that this effect works too slow, but we can fix this. We need to go to very first frame, just scroll with this time cursor to this first frame. Now you can see that we've generated our texts a bunch of times. But with each frame, it will add more particles, and this is why we want to work only on the first frame because we are going to disable this generating of particles with each new frame. Basically, what we will set here at the first frame it will stay all the time. We have only two particles down and we want to increase this number. Let's set it to 40. Basically, you can change this value to 39 or even lower like 30. In this way you can change the spacing between these lines. Let's set it to 40. Here if we will change to five, you can see that we have only five lines. In my case, if you have same resolution as mine, 1920 by 1080, which is full HD resolution, this number of particles, 140 will work great. But keep in mind, if you will change this font size, like to 50, we've might, would want to change this particles down and maybe particles across to get the look which you want. With this font size, particles down and particles across, you can generate really cool effects already. In the next video, I'm going to show you how you can map these letters on top of our footage, which we have here. See you in the next video.
4. Mapping Code Onto Face: Now let's use our footage as a map for this effect. To use our footage as a map, we want to use mapper. As you can see, we have here persistent property mapper and a ephemeral property mapper. From my experience, the second one works better. Let's click here, but you feel free to experiment with this one as well. They have the same properties but different outcomes. You can apply these settings which we are going to apply to this one. You can apply here and compare these two results. In my case, I really like how it works, the second one, so I am going to use it. Here in Use Layer As Map, we want to change it to our matte clear. As you can see, we have set it to matte clear and nothing changes, because we need to set our map red to some function which we have here. In our case, we want to use scale. Let's select it. Now you can already see some effect going on here. Let's disable this footage. Let's go out from the solo mode, and just disable it here, and let's disable sound. You can already see our outline of ourselves. We can even tweak this effect a bit more. We can open this matte clear and apply tint effect. Let's type it here, tint, in Effects and Presets panel, and left mouse click on it, and drag it to our test footage. Basically, it will make it black and white. In this way, we will not have too much redness in our footage. Now let's see our result. As you can see, now we have a bit more distinguished parts of our image. We can also go to our matte clear and apply curves effect. Left mouse click, and drag and drop onto our test footage. What we want to do with this curves, we want to introduce more shadows into ourselves. The more shadows and details you'll have, the more visible it will be in our outcome. Now we want to cut out all of this background and see only ourselves. You just need to select this matte clear. Basically, matte clear is our footage which we [inaudible] and place it on top of this layer matrix code, which we've created with this particular playground. Now if we will click here on Toggle Switches, you should be able to see these track matte. With this track matte, you can set it to Alpha matte. Basically, it will cut out ourselves according to this layer. But now, let's change this text from the text to a matrix code. You can go to Options and Edit Grid Text, and here, you can change the font. In my case, I want to use font called Matrix Code NFI, so I'm going to click on it. It's a free font which you can download from the web. Just go to Google and type it Matrix Code NFI. You can download it from side, DaFont, for example. As you can see, it's free to download. Just click on it, and it will download this font, and then install it. Or you can use any other font which you can find on the web. In this case of this font, lowercase letters like these, they will be translated into matrix code. You can type some gibberish just like this, using all kinds of letters of lowercase, and click "OK". Here, also click "OK". Now as you can see, we already have this font applied to our face. We can change the font size to 25, so we would see separate codes. Let's increase more particles across, we can set it to 100. To scale up this font, we can change not here in font size, but we can change here in the Min and Max values. We can set this max value to three. In this case, you can see that we have really small type of fonts and really big ones. Let's maybe change this particles down, which response for horizontal particles to a smaller value like 40. You can play around with this value to get the look which you like. Or maybe let's change this max value to 2.5. Let's change this min value to 0.2 to see smaller particles here as well. Basically, by playing with this min and max values, you can change the maximum scale of these particles which can be generated and the minimum. Now we already have this pretty cool effect going on here. If we will scroll through this timeline, you'll see that it generates more particles and they fall down. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to change this, and how to apply some particles which falls down across our face. See you in the next video.
5. Creating Lines of Code: Let's now fix our issue, which creates new particles with each new frame. To fix this, we just want to create a keyframes to particles across and particles down. Let's click here on this stopwatch and here. If we will select this layer and press "U" on keyboard, you'll see these keyframes. Keyframes are basically the points in time which remembers values of certain properties. In our case, this keyframe remembers this value of 100 of this property, particle across, in this moment in time. For example, in the next frame, just by clicking here, you can jump to the next frame. We can set this particle across this value to zero. From this time and on, it will remember this value. If I am going to scroll here, you can see that this value didn't change at all. Let's do the same with this particles down, set it to zero. As you can see, if I scroll through, these values are not changing. But also, you can see this weird thing, that if I'm scrolling through, these particles are falling down. To fix this issue, you need to go to gravity. Here in gravity force, you want to set it to zero. Now we fixed all of our issues. What we can do now is to change color of our particles. Here in color, in grid, you can change it to this bright green color. Something like this should work fine. You can just tie these values if you want to have exact same color and click "Okay". We can now press "0" on numpad to see our preview. As you can see it it works very really cool, but we don't really see any particles which falls down across our cells. We can change it by going to matte clear. Because as you remember, this particle playground effect which generates these particles with our code is using this layer as a map to this mapper, this matte clear. Basically, any changes which we will do to this matte clear will update to this effect. Let's try to add some changes to matte clear. We can just open this composition. Let's apply some effects to our source to add more interesting look. In our case, we want to apply some lines which will fall down across our face. With the lines which we are going to generate, we will show where lines of code will be falling down. As you can see, this effect uses bright values to create bigger particles and dark spots as my shot to create these small particles. Basically, we want to create some bright spots which will fall down across cells. For this, we want to create new layer, and solid. Let's call it lines and set it to black, and click "Okay" and click "Okay". Here we want to use effect called Fractal Noise. Click and hold and drag to this line's layer. Here we can change this fractal type. As you can see, it generates just a simple noise, and we want to change this from the basic two strings. Because we want to create these lines really bright, which will fall down across our cells. We can increase the contrast to a really big value to isolate only these lines. Let's set it to 560. Let's decrease the brightness to isolate these lines even more. I'm going to set to minus 33. We can also go to Transform and change the scale separately. To change the scale separately, we just need to click on this Uniform Scaling. Just uncheck this box. Now we can see that we have scale width and scale height. I want to squish it a bit to maybe 75, and scale height I want to stretch maybe even to 180. We would have these random lines which will fall down. To animate this falling down movement, we want to use this Offset Turbulence. Basically, the second value is representing the y-axis and if we will change it, you can see that we can animate this falling down motion. Here at the beginning, we can create a keyframe to offset turbulence and here at the end, we can just animate it. Just click on this second value and scroll it to the right to animate it. We can also press "U" on keyboard to see if these both keyframes. If we will press "0" numpad, we can see how fast it's moving. If it's moving too fast, you can just set your time cursor onto your keyframe and scroll it to the left. If it moves too slow, you can scroll it to the right. In my case, I've set this value to 720, and this value to 1,500. Now let's apply it on top of our footage. To apply on top of our footage, we want to select this test footage, which is basically our cells, and duplicate it. You can just select it and press "Control D" to duplicate it or "Command D" on Mac. Just left mouse click and drag it on top, because we want to use this as a matte. We can select this line solid and click here on "Toggle Switches" to see this track matte. We want to use this as a mask, basically. Let's change here to Alpha matte. As you can see, it uses this as a mask. These lines works only here, which already looks pretty cool. Now we can change this mode to screen, or if you want to see these lines even brighter, you can change to add. Less press "0" numpad to see our result. But now as you can see it looks pretty cool, but it doesn't really follows our face. In the next video, I'm going to show you how you can track it to our face. See you in the next video.
6. Transforming Lines Into Code: It looks pretty cool, but it's really looks like I'm behind some wall, which is not the effect which we want. We want to have this code, like it's stuck to our face and it follows us around. For this, we don't really need to track our footage. We can just select our lines and click S to scale, and then change the scale. Then you can press B to see our position and create a first keyframe. As you remember, the keyframe is appointed time, which remembers this value of this property. Now, we can change this position here where I moved to the left. I can change this position like this and let's check the result. Now, as you can see, it looks like these lines follows me around. Let's scroll through to the moment where I stop like here and also let's drag it to the right. It would look like it's follow me here also. Once again, let's scroll through for this moment where I stop and also drag it to the left as I was moved to the left. This is basic tracking which we can create. We can also select these keyframes and press F9, which basically means that it will stop at each keyframe. Here, it goes to this moment, it stops, then goes to this moment, it stops. Here, it stops and here, we can also drag it a bit to the right. Now, as you can see with these only five keyframes, we can get this pretty good tracking. Once we've done this, we can go to final effect. We can already see some traces of our codes which we created by these lines. Let's press zero numbered to see how it looks. It may take some time, but you can already see that we have this running code across our footage, which looks really cool. You can see with these lines, we created this really cool and powerful way to represent this falling down code. Just remember that you always can change this scale width if you want more denser code like this, or make it wider if you want less of these lines of code running down across your face, I will leave it as 75. Also, I've noticed that these coats on our face is too big. As you remember, we can change it with the font size, but it will also make this smaller particles smaller and this is not what we want or we can change with this max value. The best way which I recommend to change these particles is to go to source, which is our med clear. We just need to make sure that our skin is not so bright because as brighter this gets, the bigger these particles will be. To change this, we can just select this test foolish, which is enabled here. We can just adjust this brightness with this curve like this. Just drag it down. So we will get this more natural colors. Now, as you can see, we are changing this code to a smaller value. It will be helpful because in the file part of effect, we are going to apply some glow. We don't really want to have too dense particles because they will be too blown out. Just make sure that you have this kind of space in between your particles. Our future glow effect will work even better. In the next video, I'm going to show you how you can add more details to yourself so you would be more recognizable. See you in the next video.
7. Adding Detailes: To add more details to ourselves, we need to go to our project panel and we need to duplicate this matte clear. Just select it and press "Control D". Let's rename this matte clear to matte with lines. This matte clear 2, let's rename it to matte clear. Because this matte with the lines, as you can guess from the name, it has lines on it. Here in this matte clear, which we've duplicated here, basically we have created another composition. It will not have these lines. Let's open this matte clear. Now, let's just select these both layers and delete them. Let's go to Final Effect, and let's drag and drop this matte clear here below. Let's solo this layer so we would see properly what we are doing here. Let's apply find Edges effect. Just Left-mouse clicking it and drag it here to matte clear. We want to invert this effect so we would see all the edges of ourselves. With the effect which called Threshold here in stylized threshold, I Left-mouse click and drag and drop on this matte clear. With this threshold, we can show our software how much of ourselves we want to introduce. You just make sure that when you are trying to introduce some details, you are working in full format. Because as you can see, by changing this resolution, it will give you other kinds of look. Because when you will render your footage, you'll get this kind of effect and not this half kind of effect. Let's go to full. With this value, it depends on your footage. For example, I want to set it, maybe it to 110 because with this value I have some details in my eyes, and we can apply an effect called Tint. With this tint effect, we can change this white value to a greenish value. It will blend with our effect, and click "Okay". Let's exit this solo mode by clicking on this dot here, and now we can see both of our effects. As you can see with this layer which we've created, we've added more details and now it's a lot more recognizable. By the way, you can change this color to white if you want to get this kind of effect. But I am going to leave it with the green as in The Matrix code. Let me quickly explain why we use this matte clear instead of this already created with the lines. Basically, if we will use this matte with lines just like this, you can see that this Find Edges effect also sees these lines. This is why we want to use this matte clear. By the way, if you want to know how to swap compositions, you can just select this composition which you want to swap and the composition which you want swap from, and just Left-mouse click, hold Alt key on keyboard. As you can see, I'm holding Alt key, and just drag and drop. In this way, you can just swap these compositions. This is basically why we are using matte clear, without lines to generate only outlines of ourselves. Basically with these both effects, we are getting this really cool look. Our viewers could recognize what the subject is. Finally, in the next video, I'm going to show you how to create this scan line, as also apply a glow effect. See you the next video.
8. Finalizing the Look: Now when we have generated all of our effects, we need to precompose all of these videos into one composition. Let's select these three layers and go to Layer, Pre-compose and here we can just call it effect and click "Okay". Now in our Project panel, we can select our footage, which is original footage, and drag it up here below. Let's align it well, because as you remember in the first video, we've got it only this final part. You just need to align this part of your video with this last part, just like this. But if you are using your own footage, it will not be a problem. Now what we can do is to select this effect and change this mode to add. If you cannot see this mode, you can just click here on "Toggle Switches" and then select this add mode. As you can see, it's mapped over our cells and now we can apply some glow effect. Go to Effects and Presets and type in glow, select this stylized glow and drag and drop on this effect and if we will solo only this effect layer, we can see that we already added this kind of glow. Basically, what we want to do is just to play with these three values. We can change intensity to 1.8 for example, so our glow will be much brighter, but we will not use only one glow. First glow, we are going to use as a tight one and with this threshold, we can set how much of this glow will be applied. If you will go to lower values, like 19, it may lose some colors, so I'm going to set this value to 85. Now let's duplicate this glow. With the second glow, we want to increase this radius, maybe to 68 so we would get this much bigger glow. Let's decrease this intensity because it's too high. Let's set it to 1.4 and finally, we can just duplicate this glow once again just by selecting it and pressing "Control D" and with this less glow, we want to set this radius to really bright value like 215, because we want to add overall glow from these bright spots. This glow we don't need to set it too high, we can set it to 0.8 so it will only give this fill, as you can see. Now, if we will close all of these rows. Let's also disable all of these glows, you can see that we added glow core then glow around of each core and with this last one, we've added this bloom glow. Now we can just exit this solo mode. Now as you can see, we have this really cool glow on our effect. To create scan line is really simple. You just need to select this effect and select this rectangle tool and leftmost click and drag to create this kind of mask. Then you can press "F" on keyboard to change feather of this mask and set it to a maybe 75. I'll leave it at 75 and now we can just animate our mask. To animate our mask, we can click here and click one more time to see all the properties of the mask and to animate our mask, we need to animate our mask path. Here at the beginning, we can create a keyframe by clicking on this stopwatch then we need to select the "Selection Tool", select our mask and then just by clicking on this one dot here, you can just move this mask lower here. Then about here, you can just change this mask position and maybe here at the end, we can just move it below. We can just select this all of keyframes and press "F9" on keyboard to make this animation stop at each point. Basically it will go up, stop, then go down and stop. You can also not just move down. You can just move this keyframe, select your mask, and zoom out by using scroll on the mouse and just by selecting one of the points, then hold Shift and select the other one. You're going to just create this effect where it just feels you're in, just like this. It also looks pretty cool. Now, let's quickly run through what we did to create this effect to make sure that we already remembered all techniques which we've used. First thing which we needed to do is to film our footage. Then using this Roto Brush tool, we needed to Rotoscope our self. We needed to make it black and white and also we needed to add some curves to add more details to our cells. Then we've created a new layer. We've applied this particle playground effect and in this options, we've set our text with the font which we want to use. Then we've adjusted our grid. We've disabled our canon, and we've disabled our gravity. Then we used this mapper, which basically needed to be filled with some source and for the source we've used this matte clear, but we also added some lines. We've created these coats not just only to ourselves, but also we've created these lines of codes which run across ourselves. Finally, we have created another matte clear and added Find Edges effect to make ourselves a bit more recognizable. Finally, we've added our glows effect to help this effect blend better with the real life footage. You can follow me here on Skillshare and maybe check this class. It's only 12 minutes, but it really gives you an impressive result. You can also click here on "See More", because I have a lot of classes on the VFX and also text animation. You can request more classes in the comment section to this class. I hope to see you in my next class. Thank you for watching.
M Jake, Lets Create VFX & Cool Stuff Together
