This is a fun effect...
(sky crackles)
(dramatic music)
Hey, this is Steve from Unexplored Films
and I am back with another
filmmaking tutorial.
And I wanted to think of an effect
that people could try in their garden,
or just outside their front
door if they're in quarantine,
and this was a really
fun one to have a go at,
the 'superhero landing' effect.
This is basically meant
to look like something
out of a big-budget Hollywood movie,
and although it looks like it's
been filmed by someone else,
the beauty of this effect
is that it can be done completely solo,
which is how I attempted it.
So for this we'll need
a camera and a tripod,
and it helps if you
have a monitor as well.
I use the external monitor
to help line myself up in the shot.
And, it helps to use the widest
lens you've got for this.
I shot in 4K resolution, planning
on cropping it down later,
and a wide-angle will
give you a lot of help.
Also, bearing in mind that
if you're going to land
basically at knee height,
then you might want to set the camera up
lower than head height.
So I set it up at what
my head height would be
when I was kneeling.
The first thing you need to do is jump
and land in your best superhero pose.
So you might want to do this
a bunch of different times,
and get a take that you're happy with.
I did this a couple of different times,
and basically just tried to land
in an epic superhero style posture,
with varying degrees of success.
And I would also definitely recommend
that you stretch before doing this,
because I did not, and I
was feeling it the next day!
So once you've got a take
that you're happy with,
of landing like a superhero
where the camera isn't moving,
and is fixed in a relatively
wide field of view,
next, is their anything you
can affect within the frame,
that will make it look
like it has been jolted
or moved when you landed?
Now, some of these can
be added later of course,
but I think I'm from the
special effects school
of 'if you can do it in
camera, then do it in camera'.
Now, I tried this at
the bottom of the garden
with a couple of things.
There was a bird feeder
that I made fall off the little shed,
and same with a hanging
basket which I made fall down,
and then I tipped over the table
at the bottom of the garden,
and I threw some branches
down onto the ground
as if those had been knocked off.
These are all just to give
me options in the Edit later,
and my plan would be to
cut these elements out,
and stick them back over the master shot,
to make it look like it had
all happened at the same time.
But bear in mind if it's a sunny day
you may get shadows changing,
so you might want to be
really, really quick doing
this as soon as you've got
your favourite landing take.
Once you've done all
the practical effects,
now you can move the
camera, but only slightly.
I've seen this effect done by others
by them just landing in the frame.
But the real icing on the cake with this
is to add a camera move. Now
I did a simple tilt down.
Start with the camera in
the position where it's been
for everything else and do
a quick tilt up to the sky,
and leave it there for 10 seconds.
This means that later you
can reverse the tilt up,
and it becomes a tilt down,
and it ends up in exactly the right place
to match with the clip of you landing.
And that's everything you need to film,
and now it's time to head into editing.
(logo whooshes)
Next, we head into After Effects
with your favourite
superhero landing take,
and even though they're
basically finishing touches,
I was quite eager to see
if the practical effects would work.
So I instantly chopped those
out using the mask tool,
and added them back in over
the main take of me landing.
And I had to feather the edges
a bit to disguise the joins,
especially around where
the shadows had changed,
but I was pleased that this showed
that this effect would actually work.
When you film any objects
dropping or tipping over,
it's a good idea to wait about 10 seconds
before and after you do this,
otherwise you may run out of time
to use them in the footage.
Now, what I hadn't realised
was that when I dropped the branches in,
they actually went past the table
which was from a different take,
so I had to actually
make some smaller masks
to have the falling branches
moving past the fallen table.
If I'd thought about this more,
I would have probably dropped them
in a different part of the screen,
but this is why we experiment.
I also realised that when I exit frame
I'm actually crossing both the table,
and the branches that are
now lying on the floor.
Neither of which were
there when I did the run.
So I had to create another
mask around my leg,
so that I move smoothly
in front of those objects
that weren't actually there.
Once you're happy with how everything
in the static shot looks,
now it's time to find
that tilt up that you did,
reverse it and add it to
the front of your timeline.
This should now look like a tilt down,
and should line up exactly
with everything else
you've already edited.
By extending the take of
the hero landing backwards
over the tilt up, you can see
what's about to happen here.
Once we cut out the hero character
it's going to look like he's
falling through the air.
Now, I've seen others do this
just by using a freeze-frame,
and cutting that out.
But for extra points,
try and cut out as many frames as you can
of you performing the jump.
It's going to take longer but
it's going to look better.
And as you can see,
as soon as you put that
mask over the tilt,
the fact that the figure is moving,
really sells that what
you're seeing is a real jump,
and not just a still
being keyframed around.
So now we have our cutout
figure over the tilt.
The next thing I realised
was that the tilt
and the static shot didn't quite match.
Again, because the shadows had changed.
So I actually cut out a
bit more of the background
of the static clip,
which is what of course we
want it to end up looking like,
and blurred it and keyframed this in
to the last few frames of the tilt down.
This meant that it looks
less like a jump cut
when the figure lands. If I
was going to do this again
I would have probably
chosen an overcast day,
because it would have
been much less trouble,
but it was fine in the end.
Next, you can keyframe
the position and the scale
of your figure flying through the air,
to make them start off
at a much smaller size.
At this point you can turn
it into a freeze frame,
if the footage isn't long enough,
and when it's a small figure it's fine.
But I just like the fact
that when the figure
gets big enough to see,
you can actually see the figure moving.
So I reduced the scale of the figure
right down to about zero,
and also added some colour correction
for when he was above the trees,
and was in direct sunlight
before he lands in the shadowy patch.
Okay, now it's time to have some fun
with adding some digital embellishments,
to make this look even more dramatic.
Now, I've found a couple of
good downloadable graphics
on footagecrate.com, which
you can sign up to for free,
and download some of these effects.
So, from FootageCrate I used
one called Ground Impact,
and I think I use one
called Shockwave as well,
and I just tried to blend
them in with the landing
as best I could.
I also used a few of the Action Essentials
from Video Copilot, which I've
had on my drive for years,
and are very very good.
So I often see these just
slapped onto the top,
without any attempt to sort of blend them
with their surroundings.
I think the trick here
is to go for subtlety,
and bring the opacity down,
and try your best to blend
it with the existing ground.
Now, I did this on grass,
it would probably be different
if you did it on tarmac.
I added a subtle dust cloud
from Action Essentials,
and that helped as well.
And those start to make the
impact really effective.
I soon realised that because
of all the ground cracks,
and all the effects around the feet,
I would actually have to
create a mask of the knees,
and the hand, and the foot
anyway, so I did all of that.
I also realised that I could
make the glass of the shed door
shatter using Action
Essentials glass as well.
It looked a little bit
slow-motion at first,
and a little bit fake, it
didn't look fast enough.
So I doubled the speed
and suddenly it looked
a lot more effective.
Next, I used another
effect from FootageCrate
called Blue Energy Ball,
and added that to the sky,
because I thought,
well this character needs
to come from somewhere,
and it just looked a little more dramatic
using the screen mode instead of normal.
So I added this above the image of the sky
before the tilt down,
and I also did some
colour correcting to match
every time the lightening
struck in the effect,
I added a flash to the overall image,
to show that it was being
affected by the brightness
of the lightening as well.
The next stage was to precompose this
so that it appears as one single timeline,
and to actually add some
artificial camera movement,
because this is going to really sell
that all of this happened in one take.
And I deliberately shot
this on a wide lens,
because I knew I was going to crop in
and move around artificially later anyway.
So I did that, and then used
the wiggle expression tool
to add some artificial camera
movement to the whole thing,
and after a bit of trial and error
I found an amount of movement
that I was happy with.
I also added some manual camera moves
to make it look a bit more filmed,
such as a big camera shake
when the character lands,
and also a bit of panning
around at the end.
So we're getting close
to a finished effect now,
and the next step was
some colour correction
to liven up the flat looking footage.
I'd shot this in S-Log because
it was quite bright outside,
and I wanted control over the
highlights and the shadows,
and pretty soon I was
happy with how that looked.
It was also at this point
that I decided to delay
the hanging basket falling
until the very end,
as it added a bit of a comic final beat,
when the camera pans back to the scene
that has been destroyed.
And the final stage which I
really can't emphasise enough,
is sound design.
So much of this effect works
because of sound design.
Now, I started with the original audio
that I had just recorded in camera.
So, the sound of my footsteps,
and all the general ambience,
and the practical things falling over,
like the table and the hanging
basket, and the bird feeder,
those were all real.
(table bangs)
Next, I started adding
some much more Hollywood
over-the-top sound effects.
(lightning crackles)
So, we had some Lightning
happening in the sky,
some dramatic whooshes,
(whooshing)
and then obviously a
huge bang when I land.
And then there were small subtle noises
like the glass breaking
(glass clatters)
and the dust settling,
and just general things to sound like
something big and loud had happened.
And my favourite is the burglar alarm,
which I deliberately added
to make it sound like
it was actually enough to set off a nearby alarm
and I was really pleased
with how it turned out.
And so that's pretty much it.
That is how you can film
and edit this effect
entirely on your own,
(sky crackles)
(alarm buzzes)
and make it look like you've
done an epic superhero landing.
(basket thumps) So guys,
I hope you enjoyed that,
please give it a go and
tell me what you think,
and please hit that subscribe button
if you would like to see more of these.
I've been Steve from Unexplored Films,
and I will see you next time.
