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Tutorial: Making Giants Part 9 | Compositing Part 2

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And now for the finishing touches...

We've got a beautiful looking short-film, holy JEEZ!  But we're not done... no, not done.  There are a couple of shots in this thing that need some love:  that CU of the flower, and the ending shot where the type comes on.

We used Nuke to prettify, we'll use After Effects to add some effects and work on the type.

We go over some intermediate / advanced Particular stuff here, and if you aren't familiar with that plugin then you REALLY need to check it out.  It's more-or-less THE particle plugin (besides Form) that damn near every AE Artist uses.

At the end of this episode, we are picture-locked.  All that's left is audio!

Every episode of Making Giants comes with the most up-to-date projects and assets so you can follow along or break apart anything that isn't covered in the videos.

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Tutorial Full Transcript Below 👇:

Joey Korenman (00:11):

We left off last time with what's already looking like a pretty nice piece. So let's take one more peek at where we stand. Giants are not what we think they are The same qualities that peer to give them. Strength Are often the sources of great weakness. The Powerful are not as powerful as they seem. Nor the weak as weak.

Joey Korenman (01:04):

So now we need to do a little magic on near shot. Here. We need this moment, which is the first time we really see the flower close up and we're relating to it. You know, we're, we're close to it. Uh, camera distance equals emotional distance as my good friend, Ron Zeitler would say, and we need this shot to pop a little more. So I think having some sort of burst of particles or dust or something just to, just to make this more of a moment is going to make the shot more special and that's going to help the next shot. Feel a little bit more like a crazy transformation is about to take place. We also need to do something with this type. At the end, it needs to be laid out a little nicer. It needs to be animated so that it just feels good, has a cool effect to it and gives the piece some nice closure.

Joey Korenman (01:54):

So let's dive into after facts and get going. So here's our shot and we want to add some interesting little particles coming off of the flower when it kind of opens up like this. So what we could do is go to the trouble of actually bringing in the camera information from cinema 4d, using CINAware or something like that. But because this is such a simple camera move, I'm just going to kind of eyeball this. So let's start by making a new solid layer and we'll call it a particles. And we're just going to kind of play around with a particular and try to get something, um, you know, that, that feels like a subtle, but kind of interesting moment and, and kind of gives the audience, gives the viewer a hint that, okay, something's about to happen. This flower is waking up. It realizes what's happening to it.

Joey Korenman (02:47):

Um, so I'm just going to go ahead and, uh, move the emitter right into the middle of the flower. And I'm going to add a camera to the scene and I'm just going to vary sort of roughly, um, let me just call this camera. Uh, and I'm, I'm just going to kind of eyeball the movement here. So I'm going to put a, um, I'm going to put a key frame on Z right here. I don't need X and Y and then I'm going to go to the end and maybe to make this even easier. What I could do is, uh, just really quickly make like a, make a solid layer, make kind of like a circular mask like this. That's about the right size, you know, like the same size as the flower, I'm going to make it a 3d layer. And then I'm going to go to the end here and I'm going to push this camera in like this, so that this stays about the same size.

Joey Korenman (03:38):

And then I can kill that. And what that's going to let me know is that now my after effects camera is moving forward, close to the same rate as the cinema 4d camera. And because these particles are going to be kind of floating and doing weird stuff anyway, I think it's going to be just fine. All right. So, um, the first thing I want to do is figure out, you know, what should this emitter be doing? And I don't want it to just be emitting constantly like this. What I want is when this thing opens up, I want it to emit and then stop like a little burst of particles. Okay. And right now the default emitter in particular is just a point. So it's, it's literally just this one dimensional point. And what I actually want is for it to feel as though the entire yellow face of the flower is admitting.

Joey Korenman (04:23):

So I'm going to go to the emitter settings and change that to a sphere. Um, and so now you can see that, well, actually, you can't really see anything yet. Uh, I need to increase the size of the emitter. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna increase the X and the Y size so that it's more or less emitting from the entire area of that yellow part of the face. And this should probably be a little bit smaller, right. So it really is emitting just from inside that yellow part, just like that. And I'm going to animate the particles per second from zero here, and then as it starts to open up, right, I want it to go up to, I don't know, maybe two 50 and then after maybe two, three frames, go back down to zero. And so what that's going to do is it's going to make a bunch of particles emit and then no more, all right.

Joey Korenman (05:23):

And then the ones that, that emit will sort of, you know, fly around and do whatever it is they're going to do. Um, now let's talk about the direction. So right now the direction is set to uniform. Let me turn the shot off or just solo this. So the particles all sort of go in random directions and I want them all to go outward. All right. So I'm going to set this to outwards. All right. So now they're all going to emit and go off kind of in like a circular outwards direction. Okay. So that's gonna, it's going to feel a little bit more like a burst coming from the flower. Now amount of particles is not nearly enough. So I'm going to go to this key frame here and just double-click it. And I'm going to make this 2,500. All right. So this way we get a lot more.

Joey Korenman (06:08):

Now you're going to see this happen. A lot particular is not great at letting after effects know that these frames need to be recast. So you can see that even though I've changed the number of particles, I can see more particles here, but then further on these frames need to be recast. Okay. So one, one quick way to do it, um, is to just change resolution. Um, you can go to the, um, emission extras and change the random seed. All right. And that will cause all of the frames to be recast. There's a bunch of ways around that, but I'm probably, I generally use the random seed just because it's a quick way to force after effects to recash all these scrams. All right. So now we've got this little burst. Uh, I want to increase the velocity. I want them to be going a little faster.

Joey Korenman (06:57):

Let's try two 50 and I want some randomness. Uh, so I'm going to set that to like 75%. So now you get some particles moving fast, some moving slow. Let me just kind of Ram preview this part here over and over again. We can kind of get a sense of what's going on, right. Get this cool little burst. And I might also, maybe what I'll do is I'll move this key frame a little bit closer and have these particles turn off faster. So it feels a little more like a burst instead of, you know. Yeah. That's a little more bursty. There we go. Um, now I want to, I also want some variation with the size of the particles. So that's down in the particle settings. I'm going to come down here. Uh, I'm going to make the size smaller to make it like two, but then I'm going to increase the randomness.

Joey Korenman (07:47):

So you get a little bit more randomness to it. Um, yo you probably also noticing that these particles just up here, just like that. Okay. Um, and I think what might be cool is to have them grow on. So I'm going to go to the size over life property and this size over life. This is based on how many seconds the particles actually lips. So, um, they're set to be three seconds, but there are no particles until, you know, 33 frames in and then the shot only lasts another really 40 frames ish. So this is only like a two second shot anyway. So I'm going to make the life two seconds and then I'm going to draw a size over life curve that does this. And so what that's gonna do is it's going to make the particles animate on size-wise like that. Okay. Um, cool.

Joey Korenman (08:39):

So let's take a look at what we've got now, have you got something like this kind of cool. All right. Now if we turn our shot back on so we can kind of see what this is looking like in context, I like the burst. It's kind of interesting. Uh, but you know, it doesn't feel like it's tied to the shot at all. So there's a few things that I don't like about it. One is that everything's just so linear. These particles just sort of come out and they move in a straight line. So I'm going to need some more variation to it. But another thing that might be interesting would be to use some of the physics tools built into particular to kind of warp the area that these particles are able to move in. All right. So there's, there's a few pretty cool options that you can play with in particular.

Joey Korenman (09:31):

Um, and one of them that I don't use very often, but it's kind of interesting is the spherical field. So let me show you what this does. You can actually turn on this visualize fields option and particular will give you kind of a UI. That's going to help you understand what your turbulence settings are doing and what your spiritual field settings are doing. So, um, if I turn the strength up of the spherical field, you get this little red circle and let's say, I expand the radius of it. You can see what it does. So this just gives you kind of a guide as to what this spherical field is doing as far as effecting the particles. And it basically creates this bubble that pushes the particles around and you can, you can move it, uh, and you know, it's sort of warps the particles.

Joey Korenman (10:15):

So what I could do is turn on my shot, line this up with my flour and make it a little bit smaller like this. Right. And I could feather it. Um, and so now if we turn the shot off again for a minute and you take a look at this, uh, you can see that now it feels like the particles are kind of, you know, it feels like there's a little bit more of a shape that they're emitting from. So if I turn off visualize fields, it's a subtle thing, but I think it's going to help integrate. It's going to help integrate things a little bit more. Um, okay. So that's one thing, um, that would help. We also are gonna want some turbulence. Okay. So let me turn on visualize fields again. If I turn on, if I open up my turbulence options, there's all kinds of stuff here.

Joey Korenman (11:01):

Um, and what I want it to do is affect the position of my particles. And as I crank that up, you'll see that we get these wavy lines. And this is sort of showing you about how crazy these particle, you know, these particle paths can, can be now. Okay. So if I turn the scale way down or sorry, way up, for example, you'll see, you can get all kinds of crazy loopy stuff. This doesn't make sense because I, you know, I want, I basically want smooth, but random seeming paths for these particles to take. Um, and so you can play with things like complexity. Um, there's, you know, there's this whole idea of octaves, basically the amount of noise that you're using. Um, you can offset the noise if you want to, but basically I'm just going to have the turbulence field affect the position.

Joey Korenman (11:50):

And if I just ran preview this, you'll see what it does. Right. It's almost as though there's like some wind blowing or something. Okay. Um, and now that I'm looking at this, I think I want, I want even more speed on these. So I'm going to double the velocity and I'm going to turn the randomness to 100% and you can, um, you can mess with this velocity distribution setting. This is really cool. And this basically lets more of the particles move slowly, like in this, with this settings or the other way, velocity distribution is zero. It's truly random. All right. And so I like to leave, I'm going to crank this up a little bit so that you feel like you have some that just kind of hang around here and some that get going really fast and you get this really interesting kind of a burst.

Joey Korenman (12:46):

Cool. And now the turbulence feels a little bit too much. Um, you know, it's, it's kinda, it's kinda too wiggly. Um, and what I want, it's like, it feels too fast. So I want to mess with some of these settings. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn on my visualized fields and let me mess with the octave scale and turn it down a little bit. I'm trying to get smoother looking lumps, I guess. Uh, I could, I could have it affect the position a little bit less and then let's see if we let's see if we increase this, but decrease the scale if we can get anything smoother. So like we'll decrease the scale to maybe like five. So we've got big but smooth lines, right. And let's do a Ram preview and see what this looks like.

Joey Korenman (13:41):

Cool. And there's, there's a lot of, you know, these are still moving pretty fast. I think I might need to turn the effect position down. I may need to do the opposite of what I just did. Turn the scale up, but turn the effect position down. There we go. All right. And let me turn this visualized fields off and see if that works a little better for us. So now you've got this cool little burst with kind of this spherical feel, feel in the middle. All right. Um, another thing we want to do also is go up and start messing with my particle settings. So there's by default a feather on the sphere, which I don't want. Um, I think I may want to crank the size randomness up even more and I might even want to turn the size down. So we get a lot smaller particles, but then I can crank up the particles per second.

Joey Korenman (14:35):

So maybe, maybe this goes all the way up to like 8,000. Um, and now I'm going to have to change the random seed so I can force particular to update. So now we'll get a really big burst of a lot of particles. Okay, cool. So now let's take a look in context at our shot. So you're not really able to see these particles very well. Right. And so what I need to do is I need to colorize them so you're able to see them better. And so what I'm going to do is just go into my particle settings, uh, and for set color at birth, I'm going to pick this kind of brownish yellowish color. I might brighten it a little bit and push a little more of that yellow color into it. Um, and then I'm going to give it some randomness, maybe 25%.

Joey Korenman (15:26):

Okay. Now it's still kind of hard to see these things, even when they're moving. And so what might be a good idea is to take a light and add that to the scene. All right. We're just going to add a point light. I'll set it to 100% with inverse square clamp fall off. Um, and if I now go into my particles and I go down to shading, I can turn shading on and the light fall off. Uh, I can just leave it as natural. And, and actually the, the falloff that I set on the light, um, I think is actually being ignored. And this is the falloff setting that, um, that particular is using, but I can move this light around now and it will actually shade those particles for me. Right. And so I kind of want that, that light right in the middle of, of the flower like this, so that the particles that are closer, get a little bit brighter and the ones that are farther away get a little bit darker.

Joey Korenman (16:28):

So let's turn the shot off and make sure that that's what we're getting. Um, and I'm going to turn, uh, let me see, let's play with these things. If you're an ambient all the way down and diffuse all the way down, and then I just slowly bring it up. You can see that you start to get some nice variation to it. Also, it looks really nice and then the distance is going to allow me to control basically, you know, it's going to basically make these a little bit darker because they're far away. All right. Um, cool. Now another thing is, there's a ton of depth of field on this shot and these particles don't have any depth of field on them. So let me, um, let me go down to rendering and I'm going to say full render depth of field camera settings. Okay. So what I need to do is turn on depth of field on this camera.

Joey Korenman (17:18):

So I'm gonna double tap a depth of field is on, but I need to set the focus distance. Um, so that, you know, it's, it's basically focused right where that flower is. Um, so what I can do is I can just take an all object, right. Um, because remember I sort of, and I need to make this 3d, okay. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to say it, the focus distance for this camera. I'm gonna use a little expression here. Uh, and I'm going to say that, you know, um, the camera is basically the position of this layer of my camera. And then my focus position equals this NOLs position, right? So dot, transform dot position. And then what I want is to measure how far, how basically what's the distance between the camera and this focus now. So I'm gonna use an expression called length, and I can just say length camera, position, focus, position.

Joey Korenman (18:21):

And what this is going to do is it's going to basically rack focus for me. And it will always be focused right in the center of that flower. And then I can use the aperture control to really push the depth of field. Let me see what happens if I turn the light off, it'll be probably a little bit easier to see what's going on here. All right. So the particles, let me turn shading off. All right. And you know what, just to make this a little bit easier to see for now, I'm going to turn the size of the particle up. Here we go. Let's just turn it up to like three. And so now if I go into my camera and I adjust my aperture, I can really push the depth of field quite a bit. Right? So as these particles get closer and closer to the camera, they go out of focus.

Joey Korenman (19:19):

Right. And if I turned up the field off, you'll see that I'm getting a lot of depth of field. Um, so let me, uh, and I can turn the blur level even higher to if I want to. And let's set that let's set the, um, the Irish shape to something with a few more sides to it that tends to give you, um, you can't really, it's not making a huge difference here, but that tends to give you a little bit more, um, a little bit of a higher quality looking at the field. Um, and so now looking at this, let's look at it in context with the shot, see if this is starting to show up any better for us. Okay.

Joey Korenman (19:59):

Yeah, it is. And it's, it's fitting in with the shot a little bit better, but it just feels so dark and these colors are starting to get really ugly. So I'm going to turn, I'm going to do this kind of a different way. I'm going to turn the randomness down to zero. Um, I'm going to pick whip like one of these bright yellow colors like this. Okay. And what I want to do is just get the burst, the amount of particles, the size of the particles to feel the way I want, and then I'm going to do some compositing to it. So let me turn the size of this particle down to two and see if I like that any better. Um, and maybe I might even up the particles per second to like 12,000. So there's even more of them. And then I'm going to set the life to four seconds and the life randomness to like 80%. So I'm trying to get even more randomness out of this. And I need to come to my emitter changed the random seed so I can force particular to update.

Joey Korenman (21:04):

Okay. And we get this nice little burst like this. All right. And now there's, I don't know. Now I'm feeling like things are moving a little too fast. There's a little too many of them. Um, so there's almost certainly like a good amount of, uh, of tweaking. That's going to need to start happening here, but I want to show you, yeah, that's better. That's better. And maybe, maybe what would be nice is to have the, um, have the life not be as long as it is. So we'll go to the particle settings and set the particle life back down to two. And then I'm going to tell the particle to shrink down to zero as it gets older, which means some of these in this shot will start to fade away.

Joey Korenman (21:53):

Cool. And let's just look at just the particles one more time. Great. Okay. So you get something like this. All right. And this is our particle pass. Now I'm going to take the camera. I'm going to delete this likes. We're not, we're not actually using it. I'm gonna use the camera, the no, and the particles. And I'm just going to comp them all and call this particles pre-camp. And so now I can actually just do some nice compositing with this. So for example, I'm going to switch to 32 bit mode here so that now I can, I can switch this to, um, add mode, add those particles over the top of the shot, and now I can dial back the opacity of them or even better. What would it be smarter would be to add a levels effect to this and just start to dial back the brightness a little bit and maybe push a little bit of blue into them.

Joey Korenman (22:49):

Let's see if any, if this is actually showing up at all, I'm not sure we're going to be able to get much blue in there, cause they're already so bright, but let me leave that on there. But then what I could do is I could make a copy of this call, this glow. I could blur this, blur this a little bit. Right? Get rid of the levels of fact that's on there. And now some of these are starting to glow and really, I only want the glow to be happening kind of close to the center here. So I'm going to mask this layer just like this, right. Feather this. And so now I'm just getting a little bit of a glow right in the middle. There, there we go. It's kind of cool. Right. And uh, one thing I didn't do, I didn't turn motion blur on. And I think that that would help these feel a little bit more natural to help them kind of sit in that scene a little bit more. There we go.

Joey Korenman (24:00):

And you knew what might be interesting too. Now that I'm looking at this, here's another idea. What if we actually had, let's see here. So what if we actually had the particles start to build up earlier, but we didn't actually have the move until about here. So what if I took the velocity and went back a couple of frames and set it to zero? So what's going to happen. This is going to be interesting is we're going to have some particles start to build up like this, and then they're going to explode outwards. Right. And it's going to be interesting because this is the shot where the, where the, um, we start to see the flower. Yeah. This is kind of, this might, this might be kind of cool. So you know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take a, I'm going to copy this layer.

Joey Korenman (25:00):

I'm going to bring it here and paste it and I'm gonna make this a guide layer. Right. And I'm gonna turn the opacity down. I made it a guide layer so that it won't show up if I render right. Or if, or like in the next comp up from here that shot doesn't show up. Cause it's a, a, it's a guide layer. So this is going to let me see that shot while I'm working on this. So I kinda liked that idea. Um, you know, we start to see some particles build up. There's like a, some interesting stuff happening here. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to start with the spiritual field. I'm gonna animate some properties of it. So I think what I'm going to do is animate the strength. Maybe, maybe from like 50 to a hundred. And I may also bring the radius down a little bit at the beginning and then push it up to like one 20.

Joey Korenman (25:55):

So that you're also getting a little bit, it's almost like it's building up critical mass and then boom. And then everything starts to kind of fly out at you. Yeah, that's interesting. Um, and this velocity, it just instantly changes to two 50. Maybe what we do is we haven't changed too to like 2,500, right. It changes to some really big value, right. And maybe the spherical field, the strength dips to zero. This is one of the fun things about, um, particles is that whatever the settings are particular kind of remembers them. Right. So boom. And then, and then the velocity is going to push all of those particles out. Um, and another way we could do that instead of animating the velocity, maybe what we animate is the wind. So we could animate a wind on Z that goes from zero to like, you know, some giant number, which is going to push all of these particles at us really quickly.

Joey Korenman (27:03):

All right. Although that's not looking at Girton. Yeah. We may, we may want to do the, uh, we may actually want to undo a bunch of time so we can get back to where our velocity was being animated. There we go. Cool. Um, all right. So I'm going to play with these sayings. I'm going to get this to feel a little bit better and I'm going to come back. I'm going to walk you through where I end up. So this is where I've ended up with this effect. Uh, and there's some things going on that actually really, really like. Um, so first of all, it's very easy to see the particles now. So I've managed to get them bright enough, uh, when there's a little bit of glow and there's some depth of field and they're big enough and there's enough of them that you really notice it and they're there.

Joey Korenman (27:49):

And then they're gone pretty quick, which is great. Cause I didn't want them in the next shot. I don't really want the particles to be like this big thing in, in the, uh, in the film. I just wanted them to kind of make this moment a little cooler. Another thing that I like that's going on is I've masked out the particles in the beginning of the shot, uh, when they're kind of clustering around the, you know, this yellow part of the flower, but I left the glow version on, so here let me show you what's going on. So I've got a mask, right. Basically subtracting this part of the particles. So what that's doing is it's basically turning off this cluster. If I, if I set this mask to none, it's masking all this stuff out. Okay. Um, but let me turn that back to subtract the glow version of this.

Joey Korenman (28:40):

It also has a mask on it. Um, and it, but it's actually doing the opposite. It's adding and it's allowing these particles to show through. And so what that's doing is it's creating this interesting kind of, you know, glowy sparkly effect that happens on the flower right before boom, right before this big burst. Okay. Now another thing you're probably noticing is that the burst feels a lot more like a burst now. And so what I ended up doing was going into my particles here, let me turn this shot off. Cause it don't need it. What I ended up doing was a key framing, the velocity from zero all the way up to 2,500. So I really amped up the velocity, but I also turned on another option that particular has called air resistance. And so what that does is it lets your particles encounter, um, basically a deceleration kind of force.

Joey Korenman (29:38):

So they're going really fast. They encounter air resistance. So they slow down and the more you crank this up, the quicker they slow down and it lets you get these nice bursts where it's like, boom. And then everything slows down like bullet time. Um, and I also turned on gravity, but I made the gravity negative so that everything sort of floats up. Right. Cause I figured out these, you know, it's almost like little, little specks of pollen or something and I want them to feel very light. So they just kind of float up like that. Um, I made the life of everything very short, so everything's one second with some randomness and you know, I key framed the particles per second and the velocity and basically just got this little burst just like that. Um, and then, you know, you saw, I did some compositing.

Joey Korenman (30:24):

Um, one thing I did was actually cranked the white input, uh, of the levels of fact here. So what this does is it really pushes the visibility of those particles. So they really do show up. Well, they do feel like they're glowing. Um, and then on the glow layer, I haven't pushed that. I might just out of curiosity, I might see what it does if I push, if I push that, you can see it. It's not doing too much. Um, let's see what it looks like at the beginning here. Cause I don't want it to, I don't want it to start over-powering you know, the, um, the center of this flower, I want to make sure that it's still very clear that this is opening up. It's still works. I dunno. I kinda like it with a little bit more of that. Um, a little bit more brightness to it.

Joey Korenman (31:14):

Cause now it shows up even more. It's kind of interesting. All right, cool. So I am happy with this. I'm going to render this out and this is going to be put into the cut. And so the next thing we need to talk about is the ending titles. So I laid out a few different options for the way this type could look at the end. So this was the first thing I tried and I didn't love it. Uh, and then I tried using a font, um, called Bodoni and it's, it's a little bit more kind of storybook ish. And because of the, um, kind of, I don't know, like the, this is almost like a fable feeling kind of story. It's, you know, it's a very simple story and you've got, you know, the small hero, the giant antagonist, and there was something about the way this looked, it made it feel like a storybook, which I really liked.

Joey Korenman (32:07):

Um, and then I used a sand Saraf to call out Malcolm Gladwell's name. Um, and I kind of dug this. I tried it also, uh, where it was left justified and a little bit bigger. Um, and I like the way this looks too, this actually looks a little bit more like a poster or something, but there's something about this centered look that I like a little bit more. So I think I'm going to go with this. So here's what I'm going to do. Um, I'm just going to, uh, I'm going to copy this. Pre-camp here. Oh two. And uh, let me grab this shot here. So this is just the ending shot here, right after the vines have grown up set of the building and you know, flower grows on and I'm just going to paste this pre-camp on here. And so basically whatever animation I do inside here, uh, will get composited on top of here.

Joey Korenman (32:58):

Okay. So let's think about how this should animate on now. I don't want to do anything really crazy with tons of animation, right? We've basically just had this crazy circular shot, um, where we're rotating around the building as the vines are growing and we settle very slowly up here. I want this to feel like a calm moment, the music sending, but I do want something to happen. Okay. And I want it to if possible tie back to the film in some way. So what I thought might be interesting is that we've got this moment here where you've got this interesting burst of kind of energy particles, whatever you want to call them. I thought it might be interesting to reference that in this transition. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to come in here and I'm actually just going to work on the titles in this comp.

Joey Korenman (33:50):

Okay. So I'm going to first make a novel object and parent everything to that. And I want to just scale this up, make it a little bigger, give myself a little bit more room. And so what I think I'm going to do is I'm going to try and have the type animate on, um, maybe like from top to bottom, maybe with a little bit of an angle to it, I want some interesting sort of, you know, dissolve wipe, transition, organic to, to bring the type on. And I want some of these little particles to kind of float off the top. All right. Almost like it's sizzling, uh, you know, or magically sizzling into existence or something like that. So, so let's give this a shot. Let me pre-com all of this. Okay. So this is our, uh, our type pre-com and I, we can just have all of this animate on at the same time, maybe in the end, what will make, what will make a little more sense as to have the quote animate on in that cool, interesting way, but then have Malcolm Gladwell's name animate on, um, in a slightly less crazy way.

Joey Korenman (34:58):

Um, now there are some layer styles on here from Photoshop. If you look, you can see there's a little bit of drop shadow. I want to remove that from this. Okay. So I'm going to hit you twice and you can see that there's a drop shadow on all these things. I'm just going to select the layer styles on each of these layers and delete it. All right. And we can add that drop shadow back on later. All right. So the first thing we need to do is come up with an interesting wipe for this. So what I like to do, um, you know, this is a really easy trick is, you know, figure out what direction you want this to animate on from. So I'm going to say more or less bottom to top, maybe with a little bit of a left right movement. Um, and I am going to just grab my pen tool and I'm just going to draw a shape.

Joey Korenman (35:45):

That's kind of like this. Uh, and then I'm going to go to the beginning and I'm going to animate the path shape and let's make it take, I don't know, let's try 40 frames. And what I'm going to do is just animate this thing. I'm going to grab all these points in DoubleClick, and then I'm just going to scale this up like that. Okay. Then I'm going to pre-camp this and I'm going to call this mat. So now that it's pre comped, what I can do to it. Right. And you can see just get this simple thing like this now that it's pre comped, I can start putting all kinds of interesting effects on it. So turbulent, this place would be an interesting one because now it's going to give it a little bit of, um, you know, variation along the edge. And I might want to decrease the size a little bit, increase the amount.

Joey Korenman (36:33):

So you get a little bit more of like an interesting, you know, almost like it's liquid, right. And it's kind of doing something like that. That might be a little too much. Let's bring the amount down. I don't want it to feel too, too crazy, but that's pretty good. Um, and then we could go into stylize and we could use rough-in edges. Um, and we could crank up the border a little bit. We may, we may want to try, you know, some, some different types of edges here. Um, let's turn the edge sharpness down, but turn the border up a little bit. Right. And then your fractal influence. Like if you have a more, you get more little kind of cuts to it, which is kind of neat. Um, if we scale it up or down, you can get more or less detail. All right.

Joey Korenman (37:20):

So let's set that to about, I dunno, 30, right? And so now if you look at this, right, you can see you're getting this kind of interesting. I probably want to crank that border up a little bit more, right. This interesting sort of evolving liquid, organic kind of shape. That's covering up the type. Um, let me, let me play with some of these more settings. I'm also gonna put an expression on the evolution. I'm going to say time times, I don't know, 200. What that's gonna do is it's gonna let the edge animate a little bit too. Um, I'm not loving the rusty. Let's try. Cut. Cut. Might be interesting if we turn the scale up, maybe something like that. Yeah. That's kind of interesting. Okay. All right. And now if I set my type, let me make this a different color. So it's a little bit easier to see let's make it pink and I'm going to set my type to use this crazy thing as an alphabet.

Joey Korenman (38:22):

All right. Snake. Get something like that. That's kind of cool. That's interesting. All right. Um, and you know, one thing I like to do well, first of all, let's see how we feel about the speed that animates on. It's a little bit, it's a little bit fast. So I'm going to go in here and I'm just gonna make that take a little bit longer. Cause that ending shot lasts for awhile. Um, you know, we hang on that, that plant in the, in the quote for a few seconds. So I'm not afraid to let this take a little while to animate on all right. Now, let's see what that looks like.

Joey Korenman (39:04):

Cool. Now this is great. You're really starting. You know, you even just with this, you can already see that you get this interesting kind of edge to this. But one thing I like to do is let me, pre-camp this whole thing and we'll call this, um, type wipe, pat. I'm a poet and I didn't even know it. Um, and we need to be in full Rez to really see what this is going to look like. I'm going to set the opacity of this to like 20. Then I'm going to duplicate it and I'm going to offset this one by a frame. Then I'm going to maybe two frames. Then I'm going to duplicate it, offset this one by two frames. And I'm going to slowly increase the opacity of this up to 100%. And what this is gonna do is it's going to give you some layers and it's going to let you see this a little bit more right.

Joey Korenman (39:57):

Here we go. So it's going to have the effect of sort of softening that transition while still giving you that nice kind of cut-out edge. All right. Now, looking at this, it's kind of, you know, one of the things that I was a little nervous about and now it's coming true is if we're bringing the type on from bottom to top, that's the opposite of the way we read and it's kind of confusing me. So I'm actually going to do this a little different. I'm going to let me turn this map back on for a minute. Um, I'm going to take this pre-camp and I'm going to flip it upside down. So negative 100. And now there we go. Um, I'm going to move it. Let me turn this alpha mat off for a minute and now I'm going to have it animate on like this.

Joey Korenman (40:53):

There we go. Cool. All right. And I may actually need to, I may need to slow this down a little bit, but we'll see. So now I can set this back to alpha, Matt, come back here and now it's going to animate on from left to right from top to bottom, which is the way we read now. The reason I was thinking I wanted it to go from bottom to top was because I want those particles to kind of float upwards, but I think it'll still work. It'll still be okay. Okay. Interesting. So, and I've definitely decided that I do not want the Malcolm Gladwell call-out to be part of this transition. I want that to be cool. So you get something like this. Okay. So now what I also want is I want, I want a little bit more to happen. I want that edge to be called out a little bit more.

Joey Korenman (41:44):

So let's think about how we could do that. So we've got this really, um, this really interesting transition happening here. So what I'm going to do, let me, let me go into my, um, my assets here. Let's figure out where, so this type pre-camp and this map, pre-com, let's figure out what that is. So I'm going to say reveal composition and project, and it's buried in there. That's why I couldn't find it. So here's my mat pre pre-camp. I'm going to, um, let's see here. And then I've got my type wipe and this comp is buried in there. So let's grab that and pull it out. All right. Cool. So what I want to do is I'm going to duplicate my type wipe, and I'm going to call this, um, edge mat. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this matte layer.

Joey Korenman (42:35):

Okay. Let me delete everything. I'm just going to take this matte layer and turn it on. Okay. So you get this, I'm going to duplicate it and I'm going to offset it by one frame. And I'm going to tell, I'm going to tell this layer to use this one as an alphabet. Well, let's see. And I might, maybe I did that backwards. Let's see here, alpha, Matt. Let's see. Oh, and I know what's going on. Okay. So hang on. So we're going to have to, we're going to have to do one more thing. I need to take this whole setup, which has, you know, all this neat kind of edge stuff to it. And I need to, pre-camp all of this and we're going to call this mat with effects and the reason we need to do that is so, um, you know, the order of operations and after will then let us use this as an alpha mat.

Joey Korenman (43:26):

Right. But offset it by like a frame or something like that. And actually I think I, what I want is inverted Matt, there we go. Ha look at that. So this is what I wanted. I wanted this crazy edge thing to kind of happen like this. Okay. That's really interesting. So then I'm going to make an adjustment layer here and, um, I'm going to just crank the levels of this. So we'll say levels, I'm just going to crank this so I can see it better. Right. And at what I, what I really want is just an interesting edge. Okay. And so, you know, that that's a good trick, by the way. Um, you know, basically have a copy of some interesting, Matt set the top copy to Lee, um, alpha inverted mat, and then offset it by one frame and you can get this one frame edge.

Joey Korenman (44:23):

If I offset it by another frame, then you get even more of an edge. And maybe that's what we want. So now that I've got this edge mat, what I want to do is go into my type here and let me take my edge mat and let me come in here and grab this type pre-camp and paste it. And I'm going to use that edge mat is an alpha mat. And what I want is to offset all this stuff. And so what this is going to give me is this. So basically I'm seeing like a little bit of a Glint of the type, and I am going to take that edge mat, put a level's effect on it and make it affect the alpha channel. So I can push it a little bit more. Right. And then I can take all these other layers and let me make these different colors. It's a little bit easier to see what's going on. And then they could come on afterwards. So you get this little highlight moving through, and then it brings the rest of the type on. And to make this look even nicer, let me pre-camp this, and we'll call this edge type. I'm going to duplicate it. And I'm going to blur it just with a fast blur.

Joey Korenman (45:36):

All right. And set this to add. All right. So now you get this nice glowing edge kind of brings the, brings the type on. Okay. You know, and, and another cool thing you could do too. I don't know how much this would show up, but you know, some of these bottom copies of the type here, like this one, right. It's like the opacities turned down. You could actually come in and add like a fill effect, um, and push a little bit of, you know, maybe like a, like a brown kind of like a sepia tone in there. Right. And I could maybe do that on like the first two copies. And so then you can actually get these little waves of, of color, right. And this initial glow, you know, maybe I could add a fill effect to that one and push a little bit of, of, you know, almost like a yellowish tint to it.

Joey Korenman (46:31):

So it's almost like this golden kind of, you know, wipe like this to bring the type on. It's pretty interesting right now, just to see how this is actually potentially going to look in context. All right. Let's scale this back down. All right. Cause I didn't want it that big and it's going to be up here. Okay. And there is going to be a drop shadow, a subtle drop shadow because that's going to help it be readable, which is really important. So I'm going to set the distance to like two, we'll leave it there for now. Um, and then let's just do a quick, you know, let's come over here to where the plant is starting to pop up. We'll just do a quick little preview like this and we'll see what that's gonna look like. All right. And if it's starting to seem a little, like it's a little too much, then I think we'll just dial it back, but let's see.

Joey Korenman (47:30):

Yeah. It's a little, uh, I mean, it's pretty, it is, but it's a little much, another thing that might help too, is if I come way back here into this matte layer and I easy, I ease it a little bit. Right. So that way we get a little bit more, you know, like we get a little bit more of a pause at the beginning where we see it start to animate on and I'm going to come into this key frame and pull this handle. So that, that ease takes a little bit longer. That's going to propagate all the way down all of our pre comps. So now in theory, we should start to see the type a little bit there. Right. It's drawing our eye, but we're not, it's not really animating on that quickly, but then it's going to accelerate in the middle and we'll start to see it more quickly in the middle.

Joey Korenman (48:20):

All right. Now I think what I'm going to do is, you know, there's just too much contrast in it right now that brown color, I'm not loving that the glows a little much, you know, I liked the glow, but it's just a little much, but overall, this does feel pretty good. I like the way it's kind of coming on. So, um, let's come in here, let's get rid of the, the, the fill effect that we put on there. That's a little, that's a little much, and let's come up here and let's get rid of that yellow color. Um, and then for the glow, let's bring that down to like 50%. And so now you get a much, a much more subtle kind of build like that. Cool. All right. So let's say we like that. How do we get those particles now? So we've got this comp, right.

Joey Korenman (49:04):

Which is the edge type. Okay. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add another layer and I'm going to call this particles and I'm going to put particular on their trap code particular. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a copy of this, and I'm going to call this part particle source, and I'm going to turn it off from a, stick it down here, and I'm going to make it a 3d layer. You have to make it a 3d layer just because that's what particular requires when you do this technique. And what we're going to do is we're going to, instead of having particular, let me solo this for a minute. Instead of having particular, just emit particles from like a point I'm going to have it emit from a layer and the layer I want. If I come down here to layer emitter, I want the particles source layer.

Joey Korenman (49:54):

So if I turn particle source layer on so I can see it. Okay. Here's what happens there is there's basically right now, the particle source layer has nothing in it. Right? But as it wipes, it now starts to have some alpha channel to it. And what I can do is take the number of particles per second, on my particular layer. And you really have to crank it up when you do this. And what it's going to do is it's going to look and wherever there are letters showing up, it's going to emit particles. Okay. Now what I want to do, and I'm going to, um, I want to say a layer sampling, um, particle birth time. Okay. So all it's doing is whenever that layer appears, particles can be born, but they survive now, right now, the particles are all kind of just going in whatever direction they want.

Joey Korenman (50:53):

I'm going to tell them to go directional. All right. And so directional the default direction that it points is right at the camera, which is not what I want. So I'm going to rotate the emitter on X, negative 90 degrees so that they will emit up in the air. There we go. Right. And they're kind of floating up like that. Next thing I want to do, I want to make a, I want to make the particles much smaller. So I'm going to make them, let's make them too. Um, and let's have some variation to that. So I'm going to set the randomness to 75. Uh, I'm going to set the particles per second, way up. I'm just going to add another zero. So you literally have 500,000 particles per second being emitted, but you can see now you're starting to get a nice little, you know, a nice little effect here.

Joey Korenman (51:48):

All right. And what I want is I want the velocity to be higher. Let's make it two 50. I want the randomness to be higher. So I want the randomness to be like a hundred. And I want that distribution to be higher too, so that you get more particles that kind of don't move very fast. Right. So you get some that just sort of linger. That's pretty cool. Looking already. All right. But I think I haven't gone too fast. So to counteract that maybe I could do the same trick I did before. And just add a little bit of air resistance. I'm going to go into air. I'm going to add some air resistance. Um, let's try setting of two and see what that does. All right. So they float up and then they start to slow down. And I want the life of the particles to be sort of short.

Joey Korenman (52:39):

So let's say a second and a half with a little bit of randomness to it. Um, let's say, I don't know, 25% randomness. And I want the particles to just slowly fade out. So I'm going to, I'm going to draw on the opacity over life curve, something like this, so that when they get old enough, right. When they've lived long enough, they don't get any smaller. They just sort of fade out. Okay. Um, cool. So, you know, and then I think I do want a little bit of that turbulence to them. So I'm gonna, I'm going to add some effect position here. We'll just set that to 50 and let's just do a Ram preview here. Right. And remember, we're in half Rez, this isn't even Rez yet. Um, but you can already see that the render times start to go up a little bit here because we, when you, when you use a layer as an emitter like this, you have to crank the number of particles up really, really high. And it can, it can just make your render times a little slower, but you get this really cool can effect. And that neat that's really, really neat. Cool. All right. And then when we turn everything else on, um, and we render everything right, then you get this really hopefully beautiful, magical, neat looking type reveal. All right. Let's let this preview out, see what this looks like.

Joey Korenman (54:11):

And I may want, I think I may actually want the life of the particles to be a little bit longer because it just looks so neat. Um, you know, when they, when they kind of animate on, so I'm gonna, I'm going to increase the life. I'm going to double it and I'm gonna play with these settings some more, and then I'm going to come back and I'm going to show you where I ended up, well, here is where we've ended up. And I am pretty happy with the way it's looking. Um, you know, it's got that, it's got that kind of magical quality to it. And I like how, you know, you've got this really interesting effect with the particles kind of emitting out of the type. And then they dissipate and you're left with this really simple, beautiful composition, um, with this kind of storybook like font, uh, and everything's really working the way I want.

Joey Korenman (55:05):

So, um, let me just quickly walk you through some of the tweaks I made. So, uh, one thing obviously I added was I added Malcolm Gladwell's name and the name of the book. I tweaked the font a little bit. I wanted it to be a little bit easier to read. Um, and I just had a simple fade on for that. I'm literally just animating the opacity from zero to 100, really simple. Um, if we go and we look at the particles, um, basically what I did was I ended up splitting the comps into two, basically two different comps. So I've got one comp that just has the particles in it, um, that are being emitted. And then I've got another comp if we come back here. Uh, so this comp just has the particles. All these other layers are turned off. Um, and that's making it, uh, possible for me to have a drop shadow on the type to make it easier to read, but not having a drop shadow on the particles, which you don't need, um, on the particles themselves.

Joey Korenman (56:04):

You know, I played with the, uh, the lifespan, uh, which is now two seconds with some randomness. Um, I played with the air resistance a bit more. I added, you know, some, some negative gravity. So these things are floating up. I played with the, um, the turbulence a little bit, and really just, just played around the same settings that we did when we were messing around with the flour and trying to get those particles to look the way we wanted. And I built that up and there you go. And then that that's pretty much done. And then for the type, all I did was, you know, make sure the drop shadow looks good. It, that drop shadow. If I go back here to the end and zoom in 100%, like this drop shadow might be a little bit dark, you know, I may want to just knock it down a little bit.

Joey Korenman (56:51):

Cause you know, I'm sorry, that's the drop shadow from Malcolm Gladwell. And you know, basically I dropped shadow to me. It's like, it's just like a necessary evil, like I don't want to use it, but sometimes you kind of have to. Um, and so I want to do whatever I can to minimize it. So it's not so obvious. So I'm just gonna bring you a Passy down a little bit on it. You can still read the type. You can see that without it, you could still read it, but you don't have that crispness that you do when you just have that little drop shadow. It just helps a little bit. Um, you know, again, this is, you know, if we, if we pop into 100%, this is how I'm intending people to watch this. I know that I'll, you know, most people are going to be watching it this big on Vimeo.

Joey Korenman (57:38):

Um, you know, so if I, if I go to half Raz, maybe that's a little bit of a better representation of what this is really going to look like, but it still helps to have that drop shadow. It really does just add that little, that little bit of contrast makes it easier to read. And now I think we're good to go. So I'm going to render these shots out. I'm going to put them back in the cut. You know, it's pretty amazing to look back at all the work we've done to get to this point. Sketches, crappy placeholder, 3d renders, tons of modeling, texturing, animating simulating hardware, renders more tweaks, compositing. And now finally picture lock. So here is what giants looks like. Giants are not what we think they are The same qualities that peer to give them. Strength Are often the sources of great weakness. The Powerful are not as powerful as they seem. Nor the weak as weak.

Joey Korenman (59:08):

Wow, all that work. And it just flies by in a minute. But honestly I think it looks good. It flows well. The edit works. I love the way the colors turned out, but to get the emotional response out of this piece that I'm hoping to get, we're going to need more than just pretty pictures. We're going to need the sound to work just as hard. So next up the sound

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