- After Effects Screen Shake
- After Effects Screen Mode
- After Effects Screen Replacement Moving
- After Effects Screenshot
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You don’t really have to break your phone. Shatter the fourth wall in After Effects with this easy-to-follow tutorial.
Cover image via Shutterstock.
Over the past year, Instagram has received criticism for the increase in adverts that appear in the feed — and in the “stories” function that debuted in 2016. Recently, while browsing stories, I saw an advert, but it very quickly caught my attention for creative reasons. The ad was for British mobile phone service O2, and I was about to skip it until a fantastic effect appeared mid-scene. The ad was promoting some sort of insurance policy (I think, I wasn’t paying too much attention to the ad itself) for those who are prone to dropping their phones. When the in-ad characters dropped their phones, the entire screen would crack. As a result, the video footage would displace where the “screen” was cracked.
How to Make Split Screen Video with After Effects? Launch the After Effects on your Windows or Mac computer, then bring in the footage then add a few elements and use them to see the location of the footage. Once you have imported the image, create a new composition and rename it accordingly. End Screen Templates for After Effects 5 Free After Effects Templates for End Screen. All of our After Effects Templates are free to download and ready to use in your next video project, under the Mixkit License. After you launch After Effects, click New Composition From Footage and select your green screen footage. Step 2: Apply the Keying Preset To begin applying the Key Presets, you’ll need to open Effects & Presets. First, you need to open the Effects & Presets panel.
While the technique has limited use in narrative drama (maybe it has a place in the found footage genre), there are plenty of cool applications for this effect in music videos, adverts, and online content. Let’s have a look at how you can achieve this effect in Adobe After Effects. Contractor paint brushes.
I had a basic idea how to pull off the effect: a shattered glass texture, the displacement map effect, and a change in the blend mode for the texture layer. However, I kept running into a problem wherein the whole image was reacting in a way I did not want. The glass texture was affecting areas of the image where the cracks weren’t appearing, even when I would change the displacement map behavior setting.
Thankfully, YouTuber Trey Trimble had produced a video covering a similar effect, and I was able to see where the error was occurring. The glass texture was a square JPEG file, and the displacement map was working to the edges of the square, rather than the cracks itself. The fix was to mask the cracked texture to appear more angular.
To produce the effect, you will need a cracked glass screen texture Twitter what's happening. , and thankfully you can find hundreds of textures online, just make sure to check the licensing terms — here’s a starting point.
The Method
Import your glass texture into Photoshop — you can also perform this task in After Effects, but I prefer the ease of Photoshop — and select the pen tool. Now create an angular mask around some of the jagged edges of the glass texture.
Once you have a mask that you are happy with, save the file as a PNG, and in After Effects, import the newly created PNG glass file and the footage you want to affect. Bring both files into the timeline, and place the PNG file above your phone footage. You now need to change the blend mode — Lighten or Screen are great modes to use. The mode you pick will depend on the look you wish to achieve; in the example, I’m using screen.
This looks pretty good already. If time were limited and this was only going to be a still image, I’d perhaps stop here. But as this is video, we need to affect the moving footage with the displaced glass, and we can do that with the displacement map in the effects panel. When you’ve applied the displacement map effect to the video footage, we need to change a few settings.
- We want the displacement map layer to be the cracked glass texture.
- Use for horizontal displacement = luminance.
- Use for vertical displacement = luminance.
- Displacement map behavior = stretch map to fit.
In the image below, you can see that if you don’t change the behavior of the map, it affects areas of the image where the glass texture shouldn’t be.
Finally, to displace part of the footage within the cracked area, you want to increase the horizontal and vertical displacement settings. There’s no correct number for this; it will depend on the look you are aiming for. You want to make the cracked part of the screen slightly off from the original media as seen in the still below.
Using the method above, here’s the before and after on a different clip.
Of course, from this perspective, in comparison to the original advert, it would be the phone’s camera lens that is cracked — not the screen. But ultimately the creative options with this effect are endless, and that’s the fun part.
Looking for more articles about the fourth wall and After Effects? Check these out.
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Create complex looks by using Blending Modes in Adobe After Effects & Premiere Pro.
Blending modes let you combine videos in a more complex way than just adjusting opacity. In this post, we take a look at how you can use the ‘screen’ blending mode in your video editing work. The following examples are done in After Effects, but these techniques will also work in Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro, as each of these applications allows you to apply a blending mode to your video clips.
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Using Modes to Composite a Film Flash
Film flashes and light leaks are often used to add a burst of color and style to video footage. With a quick search online you can find light leaks and flashes for your projects as standalone video clips (*see the link below for free downloads). Several commercial film flash and light leaks come with an alpha channel (transparency) already keyed out. Typically these files are videos rendered in the Animation or ProRes 4444 codecs. However, many isolated light leaks have a solid background and no alpha channel (maybe just a solid black background). Here’s a way to blend them together with your video footage.
*Check out this roundup to download a bunch of free light leaks and flashes to use in your video editing projects.
Blend modes (also called blending modes or composite modes) are broken into categories. In After Effects click on “Normal” under Mode and you will see the whole list of available blending modes:
- Anything in the “Darken” category” drops out the brighter part of the image.
- Anything in the “Add” category” drops out the darker part of the image.
- Anything in the “Overlay” category” adds contrast and tends to look like a gradient overlaid on top.
Now, put the film flash in a track above your video footage. Change the blend mode for the film flash from “Normal” to Screen” (see After Effects screenshot below). This will drop out the darker part of the film flash and leave the brighter areas.
Video and Light Flash Elements Separated
Video and Light Flash Elements Combined in AE
After Effects Screen Shake
For a different look, change the After Effects blending mode for the film flash from “Normal” to Multiply”. This will drop out the brighter part of the film flash and leave the darker areas.
There may be times when you completely want to strip out the black background behind a light leak or other light effect. For example, stock footage of explosions, gunfire, smoke, fireworks, etc. is often laid on top of black. In the following example I used the screen blending mode to remove the black background behind a shot of smoke.
After Effects Screen Mode
Got footage of isolated film grain? Lay this over your footage and again use “Screen Mode“. Now, you’re footage looks like it was straight out of an old 8mm camera! With the screen mode applied to a light flash or film grain clips you can experiment with the opacity to dial the effect up or down.
After Effects Screen Replacement Moving
In After Effects you can cycle through each of the blend modes by selecting a layer and holding down shift while tapping + or – (note: this only works on a regular keyboard, not the number pad).
After Effects Screenshot
Blending modes provide an excellent way to stylize your footage with unique looks and effects – with screen mode being particularly helpful for instantly “keying” out your black background. Try blending modes with still to give your videos a cool layered or textured effect. Don’t be afraid to experiment and have fun with them!