Advanced HALLOWEEN Compositing Tutorial in After Effects
- December 31, 2023
- Posted by: MainInstructor
- Category: After Effects Go
Video Title: Advanced HALLOWEEN Compositing Tutorial in After Effects
Hey hello and welcome to this really funny tutorial about for motion because today I’m going to show you this while you are probably thinking oh cool we will learn how to create this bloody mess I am telling you that you will learn so much more because I thought about doing a compositing
Tutorial that has almost each compositing technique in it so today we will use each trick out of the box keying rotoscoping tracking mesh tracking stabilizing maybe also a little bit about cheating with some comp tips and tricks like with the Clone stem tool and I will show you how to work with footage
Elements so in today’s video the elements will be from actual VFX and now comes the best part one of you will win a full year subscription to their most intense plan meaning instant access to over 4,000 premium VFX assets worth more than 19,000 bucks so just watch till the
End to find out how you can be the lucky one okay but now back to the tutorial we need some shots for this so one shot with me pretending to hold my head and pretending to have my head already cut off so so I used a little trick here and
Put that rubber band around my neck so in that way I have a clean line for the mask later on and the second shot is the head only here I used a green suit for that but I will also show you how to do it without
And in that shot it is also important to grab your hair so we can comp it way easier later on and we actually need two more shots I think you guessed the first first one yes a clean plate or any kind of background so if you are doing this
Without a green screen simply take a shot without you in the frame and the last shot is not that obvious but you need a still of your fist because that will make all of this super easy later believe me so let’s bring our first shot into after effects
And simply key it with the kyite effect again I will show you how to rotor it on the next shot now with a simple mask let’s get rid of my head and remember that we have a marker for that already so super easy so let’s finish
This up with the blood elements so I use this one that is already especially made for a cut of headshot so let’s bring it in and I also have this still image also from action VFX that I simply place over my neck perfect or not perfect because
Now we need to find a way to have the blood sticking to my body and on my arms okay let’s fix it first for the first frame so that we have a reference and I can do that here with the mesh warp tool I simply warp it until it perfectly
Aligns with my body and if I need more detail I can increase the rows and columns and once happy let’s pre comp this so those elements have the same dimensions as our footage hey and this is essential for the tracker to work properly okay looking great but now how
Can we track a m M on our body and the answer is a mesh tracker and mocha pro has exactly that so let’s quickly go through that process here I apply mocha Pro and open up the mocha window by clicking on the logo and if you think about purchasing mocha Pro there’s a
Link in the video description that will give you a special discount why not okay in here let’s define the area we want to track and this will be everywhere where we will get hit by blood so basically everything and when I scrap through this I can see that we
Have an issue as my hand is covering the part where the blood will land so let’s also create a mask around my hand and use that as a hold out MET for the tracker this means the tracker will ignore everything that is within this
Mask so all I need to do for that is to place it on top of my body mask and you can also see what is going to be tracked if you click on that icon so every everything with a white tint is being tracked and you see the hand is being
Ignored perfect and remember we want to mesh track this so let’s enable mesh and we can also change to mesh size for more detail and set it to uniform so we get a consistent mesh so all we need to do for that is to hit generate mesh once we have set
It now let’s just Dr forward once done we go to the first frame as we also have our reference blood aligned to the first first frame and we also want this to be full frame here at the moment you can see what you are tracking by clicking on
That planer surface tool and this creates a box around our mesh but we want the box to be around the whole frame and there is a button exactly for that so click it save it and close it back in After Effects we have the effect on our footage layer with all the mesh
Data stored within it so how can we get it onto our blood layer well easy simply copy the effect and paste it onto the blood layer and now we want to see the blood mesh rendered so go to the render module and enable render and for the
Module let’s choose the warp of course and now when we play this back we see that our blood sticks perfectly but it is also on top of our hand H so a very easy way to fix this is to copy the footage on top make a rough
Mask around the hand and use the extract effect so we want to get rid of the dark Parts here so let’s solo the hand and when we direct this over we now only have the hand so the bright Parts super easy and super fast speaking of super
Easy and super fast I want to make this more realistic and therefore want to have a mask of my shirt only so I can treat the blood differently where it hits Fabric and where it hits skin so let’s open our footage and we will Roto out the shirt because remember I want to
Show you all tricks for compositing so now let’s use the new Roto brush tool that is now finally available it is version three by default now and version three is AI powered meaning it detects objects and can remember them so what does that mean let’s try it out double click on the
Footage to get to layer mode now let’s use the Roto brush and paint on the shirt and if I want to remove something simply hold on alt while painting and before version three I had to go through all of this and repaint every once in a while because for
Example my hand is covering the shirt and after effects simply forgot what’s behind it but as I just mentioned After Effects now knows that this is a shirt so once the hand is gone it needs no extra input to detect it again well because now it knows it’s a shirt
Anyways so all we need to do is to freeze this and voila we have a rot to shirt and with that you can do so much now but I will maybe just blend it overall a little bit so the blood is less obvious on the dark shirt and maybe
Also create an adjustment layer and simply blur it a little bit with a gusan blur and use the shirt as a trackmate now wherever it hits the shirt it gets blurred as if the shirt would soak it in pretty intense okay but we still have a lot to
Do so let’s bring in our head and let’s again key it as we did before and for the fine detail on my beard I’m again using the rotor brush tool this time the refine Edge tool that you get by clicking and holding on the tool pool itself okay the head is isolated but
When we play this we can see that it looks strange as it is moving as I wasn’t standing still so to get some footage to actually work with let us stabilize this shot and we could do this in mocha by simply tracking it and inverting the key frames but let’s do it
Within the buil in track and after effects let’s right click on the footage go to track and stabilize and track motion and here we can click on stabilize motion and now let’s define what we want to stabilize so we want position and rotation and that gives me
Two trackers and a Tracker consists out of two boxes the small box is the pattern that the tracker will look for in the next frame within the bigger box so I just Place both of them as far from each other as possible to avoid some extra
Chitter think about it if you want to balance something on two fingers it is way easier if you if you spread the fingers so let’s click on analyze forward and once done click on apply and voila we have a stabilized separated head to work with yes we are getting somewhere so
Again let’s add some blood elements from act FX maybe also use some of their Stills and mask out gory parts and now let’s parent this to the head so when we move the head the blood follows so only two steps to get this to a final version
At first let’s track my fist and I’m pretty lucky to have rings so I can simply track one of them in the same way I did the stabilizing I only need the position for this and no rotation and I also want want to save this data in a
Null object so I could also attach other stuff to it so let’s create a null object and select it by clicking on the edit Target button let’s track the ring and hit apply now the null follows the ring and when we parent our head to the
Null the head follows as well and so does the blood so the last thing we need to do now is to drag in our still of the fist into the shot mask it out and add it on top of the Fist we used for the trkking and we can also use the Clone
Stem tool now to integrate the hair even more if needed and this also works in layer mode click on the Clone stem tool and when you hold down alt you get this indicator and with this you click on the area you want to sample and now you can
Paint and it will take the information from there and by the way I stole this trick from the new Spider-Man movie where we could not get a perfect key of MJ’s hair when Spidey was swinging with her so we simply copied over parts of the hair that were working on parts that
Weren’t that great so even from different takes and okay if we scale up the head now a little bit this looks even cooler as it looks as we would have had our hand even closer to the camera and once you understood this visual trick you will see it everywhere in
Commercials and this also helps covering up our real fist okay as a last compositing touch let’s add an adjustment layer beneath all our head assets and add a camera lens blur effect because now our head is in Focus or the background is out of focus so now the moment you’ve all been
Waiting for how can you win the free subscription for all the action VFX assets and when we quickly take a look at their page you see that they have a variety of different categories so from explosions and fire to assets like sports crowds and of course all the
Blood elements that I used for today’s video all of this is production ready and well thought out so meaning professional codex pre perfect framing yes all of you who have ever needed to P in an explosion that is cut off at the side know what I’m talking about and on
This page you also find a lot of free assets also there are a few plans to choose from with your new subscription based offerings called avfx plus simply leave me a comment and tell me which action footage you would use for one of your upcoming projects and I will simply
Pick one as a winner in my next tutorial hey and did you know that I also answer all of my comments try out but for now I wish you a lot of horror in After Effects
Video Keywords: After Effects
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Thank you for the tutorial. Great as always . I hope to get the package
Nice Shirt
Great video as always ! Action VFX make some great stuff, considering using their explosions and dust elements in an upcoming project.
Your video is great, but you only show holding the head but not how to remove it from the neck
This tutorial is brilliant definitely one of your best thanks!!!
Like others, I couldn't pick just one. I do find myself looking for good debris and fog as well as rain a good amount of time and I see that Action VFX has a ton of that stuff. (I actually have some of their free stuff already which is perfect but not always right for the scene.) Anyway, great tutorial! Thanks!
I’m 19 and i’m a filmmaker. I really want this deal because it will help me for the rest of my life. I love action VFX but I rarely get any of their stuff because it is too expensive for me. I know I’m not gonna win, but what the hell I tried.
Impossible to just pick one! I use a lot of Action VFX assets on professional work. But I would love to have the blood and explosion assets for my personal work, and is really expensive to afford
Hey flomotion!
Just wanted to say thanks for the tutorials!
I honestly couldnt pick just one, every asset I see looks so awesome and fills my head with scenes that would be a perfect fit for that asset haha, so i'd say ALL OF THEM! Also, great video as usual, so much good information in one place, thank you so much!
Ten years ago I discovered Demon Face warp videos on YT. This led me to AE, VideoCopilot, and Andrew Kramer stuff. Great memories. I would pick blood stuff to jump again to the scary stuff and close the 10-year loop 🙂
Wow! Mind blowing. Thanks as always & keep up the great work.
😂 vry nice
If I'm the choosed one, I would use all the assets for many shortfilms, independent projects and personal projects. I love actionvfx, they are amazing!
I actually loves your videos ,so i will pick this blood effect for my next video
I'm working on a movie with a lot of makeup and special fx, it would be great to mix with vfx assets like fire and blood
I would like to use it for my zombie movie which I am currently working on and the tutorial was great, leaned many things from your videos
Such a good tutorial ❤ as I wait for it and I m using trees, houses and much more for my upcoming 3d environment created in unreal engine 😊
Awesome video! I would love to use the Action VFX underwater elements for a short film I am currently working on. We shot an entire sequence "dry for wet" and I need to make everything look like it's underwater! AVX has an awesome collection of underwater bubbles, ripples, and floating particles that would be a dream to work with!
I really like their dust explosions and I could not find them anywhere else. So, yeah! I would like to use the dust explosion elements from AVFX.
I'm planning a short film set in the 18th century. The scene will take place outside in the rain, so blending ActionVFXs rain elements with some plactical water would look super sweet! 😀
Great video as always btw! 😀
Amazing video thanks ❤
Fun video! Never thought of using the clone stamp tool, but this use case was perfect. I'm currently working on a shortfilm where a character throws the villain's head through the roof of a train (yes I know how crazy that sounds). it is based of 'Bullet train' with a kind of anime style. Already working on the compositing, but finding good free assets for debris, smoke and impacts is challenging. Looking at the actionVFX library, I see a lot of great assets. Would love to use some of these in this new crazy project!
Deffo the blood elements I would use for a new horror short I'm planning
I used the free explosion sound FX
Perfect for Halloween 🎃
Awesome video
Thank you for the tutorial. Great as always. I think I would use atmosphere because I am working on a dystopic sci-fi film.
I need download that video 😂
Im gonna use each and everything, if I get the chance to be selected
Nice
That’s really super cool 😊
Sp👀ky …
Finally video is coming ♥️