Teleport like The Umbrella Academy (VFX Tutorial)

I'll have what she's taking before I go into that effect, a little reminder that the my road reel contest is going on right now and this time there's a million dollars in cash to be won and a great team too. There are 10 categories with 28 possibilities. to win entries are open now and close on Wednesday, October 7. It really is a fantastic opportunity for filmmakers to visit the my road reel website for more information, which you can find in the notes below and now with the show we have shown different

teleport

ations. effects ideas over the years and we even have some that we made but never ended up showing them.

It's just an incredibly fun effect that really has no real written rules for what it should look like. You can be really creative and try different styles. and the styles are also character specific, like villains vs. good guys, you can be incredibly flashy or just a simple cut, but with the recent release of the second season of Umbrella Academy we thought it would be fun to base this effect on how they do it. The effect for character number five now, most of the time, when we did

teleport

, lock shots, then add some digital movement and post the same thing with Umbrella Academy, which obviously makes it easier, but this time we wanted to add something .

The physical movement in the camera works very well to give more energy, but it also sells the effect much more for me, gluing everything into the scene in a great way, so for this wide shot we did the movement with Josh running and then in the spot. He would teleport, we kept him a little longer, letting him out of the frame so we could use one of these frames as a clean plate. Then when we were filming the interior, we got two shots, one of Josh doing the move and one without Josh. in the frame and did my best to replicate the movement of that first shot I had josh in, but now with our footage filmed we jump into post effects and of course as always you can do this in any compositing software, the after effects are what we use. most of the time, but it's about the idea, not where the buttons are, so first here we'll cut the footage of our actor at the point where we want the teleportation to complete and then track the shot, we opt for a 3D camera track since our camera is Panning, but you can make a 2D or mocha track depending on your shot.

Once we have a good track and have created an old camera, we can choose a still frame of the clean plate and turn it into a 3D layer. Now align your clean plate. the plate of your actor and change the position scale and rotation to match now your actor should suddenly appear like this, which if it were a looper we would be ready, but for the effect we want it is like walking through an invisible wall, i.e. the areas of your actor closest to the camera will appear first, sometimes the Umbrella Academy will cheat a little on this, where it doesn't really matter which part of the body is closer or further away, but since we have Josh running towards the camera we'll go with the depth option so duplicate your actor's plate and move it over the clean plate then crop it to start at the first frame you want your actor to start appearing in and draw a mask around it from the part closest to the camera. then click on the stopwatch in the skin path and change it from add to none for now so we can see the rest.

Now it's just a matter of framing the mask over each frame to expand as the actor gets closer until you have them completely rotated. add a new mask for each separate area as they appear and once you're done change all the masks again to add them and you should have something that looks like this, then we expand this layer and continue the roto to make it last a little longer to We can still have some effects behind it, so next we'll right click and precompose our actor, give it a name and make sure that move all attributes is selected and that this composition setting box is checked now most of the time.

At some point in the show they have this glowing border around the camera, which makes me think about lighting in general and while it's not entirely applicable here for some of the teleport versions, you could do some practical lighting that might help a lot to sell it. In this episode here with the lightsaber using a practical light within a VFX shot really helps tie everything together nicely and that's the perfect segue into talking about today's sponsored dan light. Nan Light creates incredible lighting products for filmmakers and I talked about that. I've said it before, how this whole setup here that you see is pretty much all nan light and how much I've loved this overall, it's turkey tubes like the two footer one I have here for my key, the four footer one that you see in the background. and the footer that's hidden on the back shelf, they're really so cleverly designed and so sturdy that they feel like they'll absolutely stand up to production testing and they've been like a lifesaver for me working on this. new normal world and I have been able to mount them where needed thanks to how light they are and of course they are rgb so I don't have to try to gel anything I just change to any color directly on the dial and it has been great to have this free space minimal wherever I'm filming inside my house and they're all battery powered which really helps a ton with that set up too or just turning it around and throwing it where I need some.

A little extra light, like in that first shot I just put the light in my kitchen cabinet to illuminate Josh and combat the windows that were behind him and of course you can also plug them in for constant power but without having to worry about cables. It's a big win most of the time, so definitely check out their link in the notes below for more information and we'll be doing a deeper look at these bad boys soon too, but let's get back to that shiny, edgy thing to do this. we'll duplicate the josh layer and rename the bottom one to josh light.

To this layer we will add a tint effect to make it black and white, then we will curve and increase the brightness and then we will add turbulent displacement and this will create some subtle differences in the edges, this will make some parts move closer or further away from your actor instead of all being at a uniform distance. Now we're going to add some masks to remove areas where you don't want this border and keyframe to appear. For them, it is best to keep the edge closest to where the actor is emerging and disappear completely once the teleport is completed.

If we solo the layer, you can see that it's not just a border, it's still an actor in its entirety, so use that. a matte effect set with itself as the selected matte layer, then check invert matte and move the layer over our broken josh layer, this now makes it hollow and shows only the edge, and also adds a vector blur with a negative value to increase the width here, which is something you can do here, okay? Do we need to reboot you now? We want to add a glow, but before we do that we're going to add a solid composite effect with a black color so that the glow works with luminance and not alpha, so we'll add a glow and adjust the settings to our liking, then duplicate and modify again to add a more blooming effect, finally we will add a curves effect to enhance the blue and decrease the red for a similar effect. color tone as seen in the program then set the layer to screen and we should have something like this now since our scene has josh in front of those windows we chose to add a shiny curves effect to his broken layer at first and then keyframe returns to normal a few frames later, but this may not be necessary for your shot, it's good to keep that in mind, but now we're going to add some scrolling behind our actor, so we'll duplicate the rotating precomp of our actor . to use as a displacement map and hide visibility now add an adjustment layer below the actor layer then use a displacement map effect select the actor map layer and change it from source to effects and mass then increase the values of scrolling so far you've probably won I don't see anything because it's happening directly behind the actor, but if you add a blur on your actor's map layer and increase the blur montage you should start to see the scrolling around the outside and use curves to increase the alpha channel will make it stronger.

So now just play around with the alpha blur and scroll settings and you can duplicate and change as many values ​​as you need until you're happy with the look, but make sure to keyframe the scroll values ​​so they go down to zero once your actor is finished. another main offset appeared that they used in the show is this bouncing lightning bolt, so add a new adjustment layer below the offset layer and add a bulge effect, move the position over the same area your actor appears from and increase the shape scale at the beginning of your shot. keyframe the height to zero and if you have a moving shot like ours keyframe the position to move with your scene now around the frame where your asset starts to appear lower the height amount and increase the taper radius to make a smoother transition highlight bloated keyframes and press f9 on your keyboard to make them easier if your effect goes out of frame this way add a motion mosaic effect increase the height and check the edges of the mirror then move it over of the bulge effect, now go forward a few frames and increase the height, then go forward a few more frames and decrease, then go forward again and change it back to zero.

Now you should have something like this to match the program even more. Add an adjustment layer on top of everything and mask it to your actor's area and increase the blur a lot. Add curves. effect and increase the brightness of the blue channel and lower the red, then add a brightness and change the settings until it is blurry with a very extended keyframe, the opacity of this layer from 0 to 100 and then back to zero for the duration of the teleport and that's it, josh. he teleported inside but outside we did basically the same thing with one big difference and that's how we eliminated Josh for this one.

I'm going to contradict myself a little bit with what I said before about any software, since this is specific to After Effects and That's using content-aware fill, which I don't think we've talked about before on the show, but it's demonic magic, black magic . At first we tried to eliminate this like we did with the interior shot using the clean plate when Josh moved. but it just didn't work, so I gave content-aware Phil a try, and it's a very simple process: you simply create a mask around the subject you're trying to eliminate and then press the mask to follow that subject throughout the later shot. change its mask mode to subtract, I set my workspace to be just the selection I wanted to fill, then I opened the content aware fill tab, I'll put alpha expansion to 3 fill methods for the object and range to that work area and that's it.

I hit generate fill after effects and sells his soul to the devil to magically remove Josh from the shot and I was honestly surprised at how well it worked. I've tried content aware padding on other shots where it just didn't work at all. I like this interior shot of Josh, but for the right shot, this is really amazing, but now with our nice, clean shot, we added our fancy pants effects and again, there's a ridiculous amount of looks that you could wear the teleport you We made these here. while we were playing with our premade assets from our sci-fi and extinction magic pack to get a bunch of different looks quickly just by placing them in the composition and setting them on the screen, then we just played with the position and rotation of the scale and Use offsets and similar glitters to what we did to top off the effects that we showed here and we had all these different looks so if you're interested in grabbing some resources like this to get all these different types of looks, we've done them for 40 off. until September 24th only for those of you who watch the episode, so use the teleportation code at checkout and you can get that bundle for 40 off, but that's it if you end up trying out a teleportation effect, shoot it at our social channels. links to all of that below and until next time don't forget to write shoot edit repeat yourself