Suicide Squad Enchantress VFX for Beginners using Adobe After Effects

1. Intorduction: Hi, I'm Jake. I, I motion Zion for me creating this effect. We will read right now. In this class, I'll show you how you can create cool transformation, transition effect, inspired by the movie Suicide Squad. I'll share with you all my personal tips and tricks which you need to know to create seamless transitions and clean up to get the best result. What is cool about this technique that you don't need to have any knowledge of Adobe After Effects. We will start with basics and gradually we will get to more complex stuff. I'll explain how you need to film your own footage or you can use mine to practice on, which is available to download in the resource tab to this class. All you need to have is any version of Adobe After Effects, even free trial version will work too. I think it's the best way to learn the software. Well gradient, interesting effects for fun. And to complete this class, our goal is to create this seamless transition effect. I'll be happy to see it in my class as also your result after following all the steps. So let's get started. 2. How to Film Your Footage: Okay, so I'm using Adobe After Effects 2021, but you can pretty much use any version of Adobe After Effects. Even trial version will work too. I'm going to use standard layout. So my layer which should be similar to yours. If for some reason you cannot see the panels which you can see on my screen. For example, this character, you can go to Window and enable it from here, character, character or any other panel. First of all, let's import our footage. We can go to a project panel and left mouse double-click here, or go to file, import file. This boorish will be available in resource tab to this class. So just select it and click import. Now we need to create new composition. We can click on New Composition or simply just leftmost click on this footage and drag to this icon here, on this little icon here as well. In this way, it will create new composition with exact same settings as it was in your video, which you dropped here. So basically, if I'm gonna go to composition settings, we can see that this is full HD video, 30 frames per second, five seconds long. First of all, I want to give you a few little tips on how to fill this kind of footage. Which would for a fine for our effect, which would work fine for our effect. So for our purposes, I found the easiest way. But you can be more creative and paint your other hand and other color, like it was in the movie. So it would be a lot darker than this one. I would recommend not to use any clubs because in transition point, it will be noticeable that clock is disappeared. So this is a little mistake which I did. And just don't repeat this mistake. But for more impactful effect, I would recommend to paint your other hand and other color like something darker, like some demon is about to come out. Here, we would have a lot of contrast. So what you need to know to film this footage. First of all, you need to place your hand here. Then slowly, you need to focus on only on this part of the video. So your fingers should, your fingers should appear slowly and gradually and slowly. And then basically a unit about here to start really fast movement. Jump cut will be not that noticeable. So as you can see, I have pretty fast movement here. And then as you can guess, you need to fill in other footage where you have only your right hand, which is completely in this motion with Fast Start and slow ending. Basically we have here just a simple jump cut. And we will try to hide this jump cut later in the videos of this class. And also made sure to fill your background without anything. So as you can see, I just removed all my hands and just film clean background. It will come handy later to this effect. So this is basically all you need to know how to film this footage. So it will be easier to edit this effect. The next video, I'm going to show you how you can hide this part of the hand and we will start creating our effect. See you next video. 3. Rotoscoping using Roto Brush Tool: Okay, so now let's hide this part of the hand. And for this we are going to use rotoscoping. So to wrap up our footage, we can just select this flourish here and go to Edit, Duplicate, or Control D on keyboard. So this flourish we will use as a mask. We can call it matte layer. You can just select this footage on top and press Return or Enter on keyboard and rename it met because in Adobe After Effects, if you can right-click here on toggle switches and modes. You can see that we have this kind of math techniques, which basically will allow us to cut some parts of the Polish. So now let's create our first mask. Basically you need to select this top polish, which we've called met. And then make sure that you have selected your selection tool. And left mouse double-click on this layer. It will switch to a layer mode. So as you can see, we have composition mode and now we are in layer mode. In this mode, we can rather scalp our footage, which basically means that we can mask out some parts of this image. And to do this rotoscoping, we need to use this Roto Brush Tool. Let's let mouse clicking it. And let me quickly explain how to use this roto Brush tool. But before we need to save our footage, because Adobe After Effects can crash from time to time. So let's go to File and click Save As, and then you can save your project wherever you want. To use this brush tool. We can hold Control on keyboard or command if you're on a Mac. And left click and hold, and you can drag to the left or to the right or up and down. Which means basically that you can size your brush is you want just make sure to hold control. As you can see, I'm holding Control. And then leftmost click and hold and drag to the left or to the right. In this way, you can resize your brush. Now, when I released my left mouse click and control button, I can just start drawing on my footage. Let's start draw. Our goal here is to draw by hand, which is on top just by this edge. And then we want to include all this left part of the image just like this. And once you release it, it will create this brush effect. It already shows us what we've already selected. We can also switch the modes, for example, to this one. It will show us even further, basically, if the red part of the scheme, which means the part which we cut out. And this is basically shows us that we have left with this part of the image and this one will be cut out. And in our case, we want it to cut out by this hand, just here and here as well. So we can just continue to cut out this part. We can hold alt key on keyboard, as you can see, I'm holding Alt. Also, you can see that our brush tool turns to read. And it means that we can just cut out this part from our image just like this, which is exactly what we want. There's also, I want to cut out this part as well. So basically with this combination of green rider brush, as you can see now, we can add some details which we want to have. And by holding Alt key on keyboard, we can cut out the parts which we don't want. We want to track this mask till the part where we switch our hand. So basically we can just go frame by frame by clicking on this next frame button. And just make sure that we've cut out our hand completely as we wanted. We can also adjust our mask. And by the way, you can use wheel on the mouse to zoom in or zoom out from your image. Also, you can hold spacebar and move around your image just like this. Just hold space and leftmost click and drag around your footage to see better what we want to get out. So make sure to cut out unwanted parts. And we want to left only with this hand on top. And then just frame-by-frame, make sure that you still have a pretty decent mask. So as you can imagine, this part can take some time. It depends on your footage. And by the way, if you would play into your end, into dark color, it will be more noticeable for Adobe After Effects, where the H between these, hence a is. So once again, I recommend you to paint your hand into other color. But for the purposes of this class, we can be not that accurate. If you'll give this part a little bit more time, you'll get more precise and believable look. So to not waste too much time, I'm gonna be not that precise. So we would get to more interesting stuff as soon as possible. Okay, So now when we are getting to this part where our hands turning, we can just simply cut this layer to this moment. So let's cut it this layer to this moment. And let's also click here and go back to this moment where we started and mask out this footage to the beginning of the video. So let's now use this previous frame and also make sure that our mask is pretty decent. Frame-by-frame, you can adjust this mask to get a better result. And once you get to the start of this video, as you can see, I'm pretty much there. Basically, I can go faster because it seems to work fine. So now as you can see, we've created all this mask and we can confirm it with this green bar below. But the thing with this roto Brush tool that even if you'll save your project, this progress will not say. So. To save this progress, we need to click on this freeze button. So once you will rather sculpt all your footage, and by the way, sometimes you need to expand these edges. So you would read this cup, all your footage. So make sure to expand it if you'll need it. And then read the scalp all your footage which you need. And then just click on this button. And now basically it will remember all of this progress which we've created. And after this step, you can save your project and it will save all this progress as well. Okay, so now we produce our progress. Once you'll do this, you can go to composition. We can select the selection tool and close it here. So we would see these two layers. And now we can just adjust this router brush effect. So to see what we've got, as a result, we need to select this mat and then click on this solo button, which basically will show us only this layer. And as you can see, we successfully cut out our hand. And once again, if you'll spend a bit more time here, we'll get rid of these imperfections so your mask would look better. But we can also do some things to improve this mask. For example, here we have a bunch of little problems and we can smooth it is problems with these properties here. So for example, we can increase our feather to about 55. So you can just left mouse click here and set it to 55. And as you can see, it's smoothed out and these imperfections. And now it looks more cleaner. You can play around with this value and see what works best on your forage. In my case, 55 works pretty good. We can also shift edge a little bit. So for example, if I am going to negative, you can see that we cut out in our finger. You can shift edge with this value and just make sure that you don't see your hand here. So this is pretty much a good result. You can just un-solo this layer. If we are looking at both of these layers, were still don't get the effect which you want. So this is why we've done this part where we don't have anything in our background. Because now we can just duplicate this forage. Just press Control D to duplicate it. As you can see, I pressed Control D and we can just move this playhead to the end where we have just this simple background. We can just right mouse click on this layer and go to time freeze-frame. Just make sure your play head here on this clean plate and then right mouse click on it and go to time freeze frame. So this is basically means that we have this forage as one steel frame. And if I'm going to solo this layer, you can see that we have just a simple, clean image, which is perfect because if we will set this mat on top, you can already see how this effect comes together. And you can see that we are getting this first part of the effect. And also we can see this kind of wiggle here. So let's shift this edge to cut out more, maybe something like minus 50. And it already fixed on this issue here. But we still have some issues right here. So basically the main part of the effect we already did. But if we have still a few issues here, which we need to fix, has also we need to make this transition point less visible. And if you pay attention, it would be nice to have finger here. Let's un-solo these videos. And as you remember, we still have kind of this finger here. So if we will have this finger here, it will look more believable at this point. In the next few videos, I'm going to show you how to fix this kind of empty space here, as well as to create this transition point, which would look a lot better. See you next video. 4. Adding Shadows: So first of all, I want to face this issue here because it's wobbly too much. And I want to have a little shadow here to cover this empty space right here. And luckily, it's super easy to do. We can just use this original flourish which we have. So basically you want to have just three layers. First of all, is this clean plate. We can also click Return and call it clean. Then we have this matte layer, which basically cuts out only this part of the image. And now we want to add this layer here, this layer here, which is original forage. We can rename it to the shadow. And to add this shadow, it's pretty easy to do. You can just simply select this layer and select this pen tool. With this pen tool, we can create a mask just like this. Then press F on keyboard to see this mask and also the mask feather. And we can increase this failure to something like 79, which basically will feather this edge. If you're going to take a look here, if I'm going to set to 0, you can see this rough edge with this mask feather. If I'm going to set to AD, it will smooth out more. With this layer. Overall. We are getting this part more filled and it looks more natural. Because without this layer, that looks a bit weird. So now as you can see what this mask we are adding this really cool, nice shadow. But also we can kinda see this hand which goes below. We can fix this issue, just go into this mask, close it and open again. And now we can see all the properties of this mask. Basically we can animate this mask path. So about here, where it looks pretty much like a, we can create a keyframe by clicking on this stopwatch. So let's let mostly on this keyframe next to mask path here on this stopwatch that must lead. As you can see, we've created our first keyframe. So what is key-frame? Basically, keyframe is a point in time which remember, is the value of certain property. In our case, this keyframe remembers this point in time, which is 27 frame. And it remembers the value which is basically the shape of property mask path. So in this moment in time, it remembers that it needs to be this shape and be placed in this part of the image. So basically now with one key frame, you can see that nothing changed. But if we will move this keyframe a bit sooner here, and then move it our playhead a bit later to start seeing this kind of H, which we don't want to see. We can just simply go to this selection tool and then double-click on one of these points which we've created while creating our mask. So let's double mouse-click on this edge and then just move it a bit to the left, just like this, and release it. Now as you can see, we've created another keyframe. Basically, once you'll change the shape of this mask, it will create another key frames. So now it will remember this shape which we've created here, and position of this shape and this shape. Basically between these keyframes, it will try to move and change accordingly. So as you can see, now it's moving between these keyframes. And basically this is how animation works in Adobe After Effects, you can always move it a bit further if you want. If you want to add a bit more shadows, but makes sure to not reveal this hand here. Just like this. You can just let mostly on these points and adjust your mask. And it will create another keyframe and move it accordingly. And here by the end, I just want to move this mask a bit further. So we would have this shadow. Maybe let's double-click on this page and even increase this mask. So it would be a lot bigger, something like this. So we'd have this really nice shadow. So let's see this part. As you can see, it started too soon. This animation started too soon between this shape and this shape. So we can basically move this keyframe. So it will start later, maybe even later than this, maybe just a few frames of this animation. So now we've added this shadow, which really amplifies this effect, removes this problem with the wiggling right here. It looks a lot more natural. And basically, at this point, we can also cut this layer. So we would have only this next phase where we would have only one hand. So let's add this hand. Basically, we want to drop original footage here and cut to this moment. So we would have this continuation of this video. So you can see with this little detail, we already added a bit more naturality to this effect. And now it doesn't look so empty and it looks much more believable. And the next video, I want to add here a finger. It will complete this kind of empty space and it would look even cooler. See you next video. 5. Adding Finger: So now let's add a finger here to this effect. We can basically just dropped another instance of this footage. This one here which we've cut it before, we want to maybe call it footage and place it on top. And this one we would want to call it finger. And just select your footage and press Return to be able to rename it will display head. Let's go to beginning of this video. We will see this finger which we want to add. And basically we want to see this part where we don't have any shadows or something which covers our finger. Here at the start is perfect moment for this. And now we can just select this part of the video, right mouse click on it, and go to time freeze-frame, which is basically once again froze this video. Which is perfect for us because we want to cut out this finger. We can cut out with this pen tool which we used before. Tucker out our finger. We can just select this footage and leftmost click here to start in. This finger. Here, looking good. Then leftmost click and drag to create this kind of busier. And a bit here, something like this. As you can see, I'm trying to create this mask and close it here by this point where you started. So as you can see what this mask, I don't want to be super precise. My goal is to have a bit more shadow to cover this emptiness. And at same time, we don't want to select this part because as you can see here, where this hand will appear, we don't want to use this kind of mask because it will block our hand, but it's not exactly what we want. Mask something like this would work fine. We can also select this finger and press F on the keyboard to see the mask and mask feather. And let's set feather or maybe 255. So basically it would blend with our footage even better. So now as you can see, we have this pretty cool effect, but we have few problems with it because this finger while still looks pretty nice. We still have some issues with these edges and here with this image as well. And basically hereby there, when our arms are twisting, we want this finger to go up. So it would look like this hand is turning and this finger is lifting up with it to have a more believable effect. So first of all, what we want to do is to get rid of these parts at the top. And it's pretty easy to do. We can just select this footage and cut it to this moment of transition because we also don't want to have it here at the end. And what do we want to do is to use this matte layer. We can just simply select it and press Control D to duplicate it. And let's place it above of this finger, which basically will cut out this top part of this finger. Okay, so we place it on top and it works great because now we can just lift our finger and it will hide behind this hand, which we write as capped. So let's do exactly that. And now basically when it starts to lifting, we want to create a keyframe for position. So about here, just before it lifts, I want to press P, select this finger and press P and to see the position and create a keyframe by clicking on this stopwatch. And now we can just simply start moving this finger bit later by using this selection tool. And let's just move it a bit up like this. So now we have this kind of subtle motion. Make sure that you're moving not just up. Because we still have this edge of this table. As you can see. We want to move up and still trying to keep this line intact. So as you can see, I don't want to move it just up here, but up and towards this line. So now as you can see, this motion looks a bit more believable. And by the end, as you can guess, we just want to move it up and still by this line as well. So now as you can see, we have this kind of motion of lifting the finger. And about here where we almost lifted up. We can also press T on keyboard to see our opacity. Create a keyframe and make sure that this opacity, which basically transparency, will go to 0. So it will be just fade away. Once again, let's press P on the keyboard to see if this movement still looks right. Maybe I want to move it a bit to the left. Now as you can see, by tweaking this position, we can get pretty seamless transition, which is exactly what we want. So we would have this finger which slides up. And so it would look like it twist with our hand. And I was, you can see with this first movement, it blends better. So now we've added more kind of filling effects to this part of the image. And now at the beginning of this video, it doesn't look so empty and it looks more believable. Once again, I want to remind you that this effect will work really good. If you'll spend more time on this edge of the mask, you can have this kind of wobble here. But if I'm going to shift the edge, we can hide this parts. Or just make sure to spend a little bit more time to make sure that this H is scattered out perfectly. And in this case, this effect will look even more smoother, but overall it looks pretty good. And the next video, I'm going to show you how to blend this part here with this final shot so it will not be this rough jump cut. See you next video. 6. Blending Transition: So finally, let's add this kind of transition point here. So this will not look as rough as this jump cut looks right now. So my case basically I just want to kind of cover this swatch here. So to cover this watch, I want to use original footage from this project panel. We can just drop it original footage and I can just press Enter on keyboard and rename it to transition. Basically it will be just a few frames, so we can just cut it here. These few frames will help blend this part. So my keys, I want to previous frame only on this part where I have my hand without the watch. And once again, I want to right mouse click on it and go to Free Spring. And roughly I can just cut with this mask, my hand right here and close it. So something like this mask should work fine. We can just now go back a few frames and we want to rotate and position this hand on top of our original hand. For this, I want to press P and hold Shift. As you can see, I'm holding Shift and press R. I would see this position and rotation. We can also hold Shift and press T to see opacity because we would want to have some fade in and fade out animation. First of all, I want to create a position keyframes. In my case, I don't really need this file shot because we already have it here. I need to move my hand and rotate it a bit. So let's rotate it. Then, use the selection tool and just roughly tried to match this hand here. Just like this. We can also adjust the mask if you want. Then we can just read position and rotation keyframes and go back a few frames and also rotated a bit and trying to match like this. And also let's create a keyframe for opacity and set it to 0. Then few frames later. We want to go to 100. So basically it will pay them like this. And we can also select this layer and press F on the keyboard to see mask feather. And try to feather it out a bit more like 55. So we would not have any edges. If I am going to set to 0. You can see this rough edge and it's too noticeable. And if we will set to 55, we can blend it better. So now we have this much more smooth transition. And as you can see, it looks pretty seamless. So this is how you can blend your two hands together and it looks really, really seamless. So once again, to make this effect a lot more professional, you just need to spend more time on this mask, which we created at the beginning of this class. And by the way, let me quickly show you. Another way is just not to use a brush tool here. Because I think it's, Kant also might work. 7. Easy Rotoscoping: So let's select this, flourish here. And let's solo it. So we will see it. And we can use simple mask tool. So I'm pretty sure that we can just create this kind of mass. So it will wobble the smudge as the Roto Brush Tool. By the way, to create these kind of Bezier curves. You can just left mouse click, hold and drag to create this kind of curved corners though Let's try do this. Then we can press M on the keyboard and track this mask. And let's try to track it like this. Because you can see it's it does pretty good job until this point and we can just cut it. From here. We want to select this mask and track it backwards. What is cool about this method is that we don't, we will not have any wiggles here in this part of the image, which could even work better than my original example. Okay, so now it works pretty good. But at this point you can see that we still have this problem. And this is where we want to delete all of these keyframes and basically animated by hand, just keep your frames and select the selection tool and move these points so this mask will follow our hands. Let's also skip your frames backwards to see if it works good. It works pretty good. Let's give few more frames. And as you can see, this method maybe would work even better. Here by Dia, make sure this, we still have our hand. Made sure not to lose your hand here because it will look weird. And basically here we can just cut out this layer. And let's un-solo this layer, call it a mask mat, and try to disable this metal layer and set it here. And let's disable these are layers to see how it looks. As you can see, it looks pretty good. We don't have that wobble wish we had before. And we can also go to feather like this mask met and go to feather. Now let's set it maybe 215. So you'd have this kind of feathered edge. As also we can go to mask expansion and reduce it to cut in and out of hand. There may be further, let's set to nine. You can see that this method was also pretty good and we can enable our shadow finger. And let's duplicate this mess met and use instead of this mat. And let's enable N for each N transition point, which we read it here. And as you can see, this method works even better. So now you know two ways how to mask out your footage. Um, but we can still kinda see this problem with our finger and it's pretty easy to fix. You can just select this finger, press P to see the position and move a bit up. So we would hide that edge, which looked pretty bad. And now it looks a lot better. Thank you for those who watch till the end of this class. Because now you know how to create this effect a lot cleaner and even faster with this kind of masking. And I really liked this transition point with the watch because it looks pretty seamless. Feel free to follow me here on Skillshare. As you can see, I have VFX classes using Adobe After Effects, as well as I upload nucleus is every week. I also have this fundamentals of Adobe After Effects. If you're just getting started on my badger hair complex VFX. For those of you who want to learn more complex stuff, and also logo animation and even Da Vinci Resolve class. I recommend you to watch this 12th minutes class, which is pretty short, but we can get really powerful result at the end as well as this one because it's pretty similar to class which you just watch right now. Thank you for watching my class. I hope you'll follow me here on Skillshare and I can't wait to upload two more classes for you. See you next time.