Create a Cinematic Look with After Effects Tricks!

- Hey what's up guys,Kris Truini here, for Kriscoart Productions,welcome to this weeks video.I've been super busy for the past couple of weeksso instead of just coming up with a new effectto break down and do a tutorial onI figured Id just show youa couple of things that I'm doingfor the projects that I'm currently working on.Now some of the principles that we'regonna be looking at in this tutorialhave already been exploredin some of my previous tutorialsbut I figured I'd just give you a few moreexamples on ways of applying those techniques.So let's jump into After Effects andlet's get started.So this is a scene that we're gonna beworking withand I'm gonna start by creating a new null objectbecause we need to track our scenesince we have a little bit of camera movementso I'm just gonna go under animationtrack motion, and then I'm just gonnapick a spot that has some nice sharp edges andjust some good contrast that our trackercan work with and we have plenty of choicesin this image, but I'm gonna go with thislittle spot here on the walland once I find a good spot I'm gonna clickon track forward and after effects it's gonna do itstracking magic.And then once we're done, we're gonnamake sure that the target is our nullthat we created, and then we're gonna hit applyand click OK when this box appears,and we have a null that perfectly sticksto our scene, and we're gonna be using thisto track any kind of lighting or shadows effectsthat we're gonna be creating, so let's do exactly that,and we're gonna create a new solid,we can make it black or, what I usually dois I pick whip the darkest part of my imagejust to keep it consistent with therest of the look.Then let's just shut that off for now,and let's just start to draw somepretty much just some sort of spotlightsthat are created by these fluorescentsnow obviously as you an see by this image,fluorescents have a very large spread butwe're exaggerating and umgiving them a direction,nothing too complicated, just creating some maskson the solid, saying them to subtractyou can go as detailed as you want with thisand then you can change the transfer modeto soft light, and this makes it blend withthe environment quite well.Now we need to make sure that this dark solidis parented to our null, so it can stick to our scene,and then as I scoll through here you can see thatit's sort of not fitting our scene entirelyso I'm just gonna be lazy and stretch this outbut ideally when you're first creating a solidyou wanna make sure that itslarger than your composition so that youhave some room to play with.So I'm gonna create a new solidand I'm just gonna create sort of a vignetteeffect, so just create a circular massset it to subtract, feather it out,then you can you know, sort ofplay with the mass expansion andof course you can play with the opacity ofany of these layers,because they might be a little bit too harsh.If I jump in to Premiere,you can see soon as it refreshes thatit is quite harshthat the shadows that we created arevery harsh, and as you can see on my timelineI have an adjustment layer, over everythingwith my grading andit's really crushing all of those darker areasof the image, so it's not really workingunless you want this sort of a dramatic effectin your scene,not quite what I'm going for,and of course you can drop in some curvesin premiere, brighten the whole scene upand you know, just make sure you're notoverexposing any areas of your image,you wanna keep it nice and dynamic,but if that's still not enough of courseyou can mess around with the opacityof any of the layers that we createdin after effects, to get your desired look.So this is what the shot looks before any gradingand this is what it looks like afterwe added some nice anamorphic bars and of coursethere's a heavy grade to our s log two footage.So let's take a look at our next shot,this is just the exterior,of the same place,but right off the bat we can noticethat there are quite a few elementsthat are distracting our viewers fromwhere the attention should bewhich is in the center of the frameinto the entrance to the shopand that is the car on the side, andthis very bright street on the far leftof the screen, its sort of allowing yourviewers eyes to navigateand browse around all over the image insteadof just focusing on the center of itwhere the action is taking place.So this is an example where you sort ofneed to have a strategybehind where you want your viewer to lookand based on that, you can then add shadowsadd light, and pretty much guide youraudiences attention to where you want it to be.So let's drag this clip into our timeline in premierethis way I can show you how to dynamic link,which by the way I've done a tutorialwhich covers all of it extensively,and you can find it in the annotationspopping up in the bottom here.So let's drag that inyou can see that I already have somegrading applied to it because of ouradjustment layer, so let's right click on it andselect replace with after effects compositionso then we have that same clip of that lengthin a composition in after effects,and we're pretty much gonna do the sameprocess here, we're creating a new null objectand we're tracking our scene here,so this spot seems prettypretty good for our tracker,gonna make our tracking area justa little bit biggerand then I'm gonna hit track forward.Then hit apply, click OK, and now we havea null that once again sticks to our sceneso that we can parent all of the elementsthat we're gonna be creating to that nullso that they follow our camera movement.New solid, just like before, the solid settingsshould be the same as our previous shotso I'm gonna click OK,and this time, gonna be a little bit smarterand I'm gonna scale this solid upso that I have a little bit moreroom to play with.Now what I'm gonna do ispretty much draw a cone of lightand the idea here is that it's sort of beingadmitted by this sign, this neon signon top of the shop's entrance,and again this is all very subjectiveobviously it depends on your scene,but what I'm doing is I'm trying tokeep in mind,what my light sources are in my scene,and drawing shapes of light based on them.Again just examine your shot beforedrawing anything and sort offigure out a way to simulate based onthe sources that you have within your shot.So now let's take care of blockingsome of the light coming fromthat left street and blocking our right sideof the image so that we don't paytoo much attention to that car.Again I made the same mistake, I should havemade the solid a little bit largersince as you can see as I scroll downto the bottom here, we're seeing a sharp edge.So, I'm gonna just make a few adjustmentsjust to fix that.And obviously you have to readjust the mask,but once you do that you can see that your eyes arealready being drawn to the centerwhere they should be.Now if we jump in back into premiereyou can see that we created sort of avery exaggerated effect,that almost looks like someone is justshining a flashlight or a spotlightonto this building, and that might bewhat you want, butit doesn't really work for this scene,so we need to just make a few adjustmentsjust to make it look a little bit more naturalwhile still drawing in the viewers attentionto this shops entrance.So you can see that just by lowering the opacityof some of these solids that we createdwe are achieving a much less exaggerated effectand of course we can take it step furtherby adding some curvesin premiere like we did before,and we're just gonna make a few final changesa little bit later, but for now I wanna show youanother thing that you can do.So what we're gonna do is createa new adjustment layer,and we're gonna make a mask that sort offollows the shape of these windows,as well as the main entrance of the shop,and then of course you need to parent itto the null objects,so that it sticks to our sceneand then we can feather the mask outand then I'm gonna add an effectcalled exposure andas you can tell by the nameit's gonna effect the exposureof this portion of our sceneand if I bump it up you can see that we'rewe're seeing more of what's inside the shopand that's gonna help to you knowdraw the audiences eyes further into the shop.And we can even create a sort of glowthat's being admitted by the lightsfrom inside the shopout into the streets, sowhat we're going for here is sort of a lookthat's a lot later in the daythan what we're seeing here in the shotso that the streets are a little bit darkerthe Sun is probably settingand our main source of light isthe light from inside the shop.So in this adjustment layer I addeda tint effect, and I'm just pretty muchjust sort of trying to match the warmishcolors of the fluorescent lights inside.Fluorescents are almost never this warmbut the way I white balance my cameraI want it to exaggerate the warmthof these particular fluorescentssince the shot that we're seeingneeds to seem like a warm placea welcoming place and you knowgreenish, white fluorescents aren't reallythe best sources of light to haveto achieve that sort of idea,I really wanna explore a lot moreon just cinematography in generaland lighting your scene,because nothing is randomthere's always a thought process going intoa light placement, the color of a lightand I really wanna just focus in on theseparticular elements of filmmakingin future videos, so hopefully there willbe a lot more on that soon.So anyways, to further add to the idea ofbeing later in the day, andhaving the shop's lights as the main sources of lightin this scene, what I can dois add a curves effect to our footage layerand sort of mess with ituntil we get the sort of effect that we wantand at this point once you have your scenebasically set up, it's all a matter of just goingback and forth between premiere and after effectsand adjusting the opacity of the layersthat we created, the curves adjustment,that we made on our footage layerand obviously jump back and forthbetween premiere because premiere is gonnashow you what the final shot looks likewith all the color grading.And speaking of which, of course we canmodify the color grading itself tobetter suit what we're trying to do sowe can mess around with some of these settings,in this case, I'm using Magic Bullet Lookswhich is a fantastic plug in for bothafter effects and premiere,as well as a bunch of other programs,and it allows you to pretty much justcolor grade on the go, be very fastand efficient, and still be a very powerful tool.So this is what our before shot looks likeand again keep in mind that this iss log two footage, which is very flatand this is our shot after all the adjustmentsdefinitely quite an improvement.Alright guys, that is it for this tutorialI hope enjoyed it, if you did?Please hit that like button,and I hope you learned just new waysof improving your shotand