So today's video is one that I didn't
actually plan on making, but you guys
requested it quite a few times when I
uploaded the breakdown of Sounds of the
Pacific Northwest. I got a ton of
requests asking me to show you exactly
how I pulled off this shot and turned
this boring drone shot into a banger
using Adobe After Effects. So today we're
gonna dive into the comp, walk you
through some mistakes I made and what
eventually worked to pull off this
effect, and I also want to show you kind
of us a little bonus at the end another
effect that has some pretty heavy visual
effects on it that no one really seemed
to notice, so stick around for that. I
actually didn't intend to go very
effects-heavy on this clip at all. I just
ended up doing that because the location
we initially planned to shoot at was
completely covered in snow, so we had to
kind of fall back and opt instead for
a much less dramatic lake right next to
our Airbnb. It was also a lot later in the
morning when we ended up getting the
drone up just because I was running
around shooting a bunch of other stuff
for that blue hour sequence at the end
of the video. When the drone actually
went up into the air it wasn't really
blue hour anymore, but we had to make the
most of it. But that wasn't the end of
the world when I realized that I was
gonna have to use some pretty serious
visual effects on this, because I
expected it to be
pretty easy right- just mask out the tent
and the foreground and slap a fake
mountain behind it and we're good right?
Wrong- I tried that and it looked
terrible because the parallax was very
unrealistic. The background moving in
relation to the foreground just didn't
look realistic at all. That's because we
only had two layers of depth in the shot.
I did a lot of experimentation trying to
get that parallax right. At one point I
downloaded a bunch of individual tree
stock photos and was gonna basically
build a little 3d forest behind the tent
so that you would have a realistic
parallax when the camera moved in. I
tried to learn about 3d projection to
turn my mountain photo into a 3d asset
the
the camera could move towards and you'd
see it moving at different rates. And
none of it looked good, but here's what
eventually worked. So let's start at the
very back of the shot and work our way
all the way up to the camera. So at the very
back we have the sky layer, then the
mountains in front of that, then a fake
tree layer, then finally the actual
foreground, an adjustment layer to make
the tent look like it's glowing, and then
a color grade and an animation on top to
really wrap it all up and make it look
more solidified into one shot. The first
step was to mask and track the raw
footage so that I could add these other
fake assets behind it and replace the
background. So I basically went through
by hand frame by frame and masked out
the foreground, the tint and the ground
right behind it, so we had that separate
from everything behind it. Then I tracked
two points on that foreground layer and
attached a null object to them, and
everything in the background is attached
to that null object. Then I began
compositing in the background starting
out with this tree layer directly behind
the foreground. And this is just a stock
photo that I found online and then I
luma keyed out the sky so that the trees
would be on their own. Then I masked out
the hill behind the tent and feathered
that mask up so that the trees behind
the tent would blend into the fake tree
layer that I added directly behind them.
Having this tree layer directly behind
the tent is key because it hides the
seam between the ground next to the tent
and the mountain way behind them, so it
makes it to where you can't see that
weird change in parallax between them
that makes it obvious that it's a
composite. For the mountain I had to
composite it in a little bit differently
because it's so much further away from
the camera, so at first what I tried to
do was create a realistic parallax by
pushing it back in 3d space, and if you
want to create a similar effect where
you're compositing something in that's
really far away from the camera this is
usually a good place to start because a
lot of the time this is what you need to
do to simulate that realistic
parallax is have it further away in 3d
space so that it's not as affected by
the cameras motion and the track. But
what I realized when I did that is that
for this shot the side-to-side motion in
the clip actually isn't from the camera
moving side to side, it's from me panning
and tilting the camera to keep the
framing, and that'll affect the entire
shot. So a good rule of thumb to keep in
mind for this is that if you're causing
motion by moving the camera side to side
or up and down that's going to create a
parallax between the foreground and the
background, but if you're rotating the
camera tilting it side to side or up and
down panning around then that's gonna
affect the entire frame equally and you
won't have any parallax. So instead of
pushing the mountain back in 3d space I
just created a separate track but this
one didn't affect the scale so it would
still have the position keyframes but as
the camera's moving in closer to the tent
the background doesn't scale up to match
it. It stays at the exact same scale like
it would if it was actually there. Also
the reason that this camera angle is a
little different from the rest of the
video is because as I was going back to
do screen recordings I realized that I'd
put in the video that I pushed the mountain back in 3d space, and then I remembered
that that didn't work and that's
actually not what I did. Give me a break.
It's been a while since I did this
effect and I did what I could to purge
it from my memory because it was a pain.
Um back to the video. What are we talking
about now? Sky replacement. Sky
replacement. Then finally I just replaced
the sky in that mountain photo so that
it would match with the cloudy weather
that happens in the rest of that
sequence, and boom you've added a fake
mountain into the background of your
drone shot. But there's a few more things
for this particular shot that we need to
add in to make it look good and to hide
the seams in these visual effects. The
idea of this shot was to have the orange
glow in the tent contrast with the dark
blue of the rest of the scene, so we had
someone in the tent turn on a light on
cue as the drone was moving forward. But
because it's so bright when we actually
filmed this, you can barely see him turn
on the light. So we need to compensate
for that
with visual effects. Basically to do this
I just duplicated that foreground layer
that has the tent as part of it,
masked around only the tent so that we
have it on its own separate layer, then
used curves to brighten it and give it a
bit of a warmer tint. Tint like t-i-n-t not
t-e-n-t. Tint. I also went in and color
corrected all of the layers separately
so that they would match, like the
mountain in the background is a bit too
purplish blue and not greenish blue
and the foreground is obviously not
really blue at all it's more kind of
just tan and brown, so i made it blue. And
then once everything looked pretty
consistent I added a final grade over
the entire shot and this is what really
solidifies the effect because I went
with a really dark monochrome grade, just
blue across the entire image and really
deep dark shadows. That dark color grade
is key because it hides some of these
seams in between the effects. For example
if you look at this big tree behind the
tent, you can see that it kind of just
disappears halfway up the trunk of the
tree, but with the color grade you don't
really notice that. I also just added a
ton of blue into the shot to simulate
blue hour lighting conditions that you
get early in the morning and also to
make the tent pop when he turns on that
orange light. Finally since this shot is
16:9 and my final video was
widescreen 2.35:1
aspect ratio, I was able to animate a
tilt down under those widescreen bars.
This is something I almost always do
for most of my clips. Whenever I have
those widescreen bars on, I animate a
little bit of motion under them. This
just adds an extra subtle element of
choreography to the drone shot having
that nice slow tilt down and also just
helps to blend the layers together a bit
more because you have them all doing
that motion together. And there we go.
That's how I added a giant fake mountain
into the background of this drone shot.
But before we end off this video, let's
talk about one more visual effects shot
that I don't think hardly any of you
noticed, even
after I posted the before-and-after I
only got like one comment even
acknowledging this effect. That's later
on in this sequence with the tent and
it's the coffee shot at the very end. We
didn't actually make coffee for this
clip. It's just water in the mugs and
when we hit those mugs together some of
that water splashes out and you can see
it in the shot and it's water so it's
clear because that's how water is but it
needs to be coffee. Coffee's not clear,
it's red. So I was kind of banging my
head against my desk when I went to edit
this shot and realized that very obvious
mistake that I should have thought of
while we were filming. But After Effects
can do anything so I literally went in,
masked out frame by frame
all of those water droplets, and used
curves to darken them and give them kind
of a reddish brown coffee colored tint.
Also it's water right, like it's a very
organic in shape so they look completely
different in every frame. So it wasn't
even worth trying to like make one mask
and then animate it throughout the scene,
so I literally just masked it out
separately on each frame, started new on
every single frame. This didn't take as
long as the tent shot, maybe took me
like one or two hours to make this
coffee effect, but it was a pain in the
ass because it was just so boring
monotonous and tedious trying to mask
out this water that's not even like a
real shape. But as inconvenient as it is to do stuff like that, you will not regret it
when your video is live on YouTube and
you just made it
that little 1% better. Whenever you can,
always focus on the little details like
that, because as small as they are, they
do end up making a big difference. But I
hope you enjoyed this video found it
insightful learned some new techniques
from it, and if you did do feel free to
show your support
by leaving like on the video sharing it
with your friends or even subscribing to
my channel. I upload new filmmaking
tutorials every week or so, but that's
all for now.
Keep creating and I'll see you in the next one.
