Cutting somene’s head off with a lightsaber

[Russell Morton]

Hey,

For the head a simple option would be to mask around another copy of the head and animate it to appear as if it is flying off. So you could use a combination of Position, Rotation and Scale. And enable motion blur for that layer.
This does have a tendency to look sorta fake. So what Ive done in the past is just after the head starts flying off I cut to a closeup of the head spinning though the air. (that was just me spinning around in front of my camera, Masked off, then sped up)
For the blood you could try using some kind of particle plug in. I use Trapcode Particular but i think you could probably get a good effect with some of the ones that come with AE. Maybe CC Mr Mercury.

Hope it helps

Rus

[Robert Storm]

Wow, thanks for the fast reply. I’ll try that, thanks. Does trapcode particular work like a plugin?

-Robert Storm

[Russell Morton]

Yea its an After Effects Plug in. You can download a demo of it from the website. But to be honest you don’t really need to as the stuff is there to do what you need perfectly well already. Have a go with Mr Mercury because thats a really easy one to get to grips with.

[Robert Storm]

All rightey, will do. Thanks alot for your help.

[Randall Murphy]

Andrew Kramer has some great tutorials for doing just that.

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials.html

[Robert Storm]

Yeah, I’d seen those, and those worked great. I just wanted to know how to make the head look realistic when its falling off, and how to make realistic looking blood come out (as it says in the first post).
Thanks!
-Robert Storm

[Eric Barker]

Well, first off, you don’t need blood. In the Star Wars universe, it’s explained that lightsabers automatically cotterize wounds, although this was probably just an excuse so that Lucas Films didn’t wind up with an “R” rating slapped on the series. But, never-the-less, you’ll never see blood spurting out from a lightsaber wound. Doing so here would make it look “not quite right” if you’re trying to make it “authentic”.

Secondly, if you have the opportunity to shoot again, or haven’t shot yet, I’d figure out how you were going to do this before hand. This will greatly enhance the quality of the finished product, and make your life a lot simpler.

A head doesn’t just fly off, it’s probably going to roll off forward or backward as well, and tilt as it’s going. Shoot the scene twice, once for the body motion (does his headless body fall backwards?), then reposition him in the same spot to get the head motion (falling forward or to the side will be the easiest; have him turn a bit too). Since you’re only going to be working with 8 or so frames, and this is a quick action sequence, I wouldn’t worry too much about it being EXACTLY in the same place; after all, you’re just going to be super-imposing the head and placing it manually anyway.

Afterwards, you’re going to want to first make his head dissappear, but then copy that same video track, and mask out just the head. If you have him turn or move, you’ll have to keyframe the mask shape, but this shouldn’t be more than 7-8 frames (heads fall fast), so it shouldn’t be too much work. Oh, set your anchor point to the middle of the head, because that’s the head’s center of gravity (when it’s decapitated), so it’ll rotate around that point. Then simply animate it’s path off the shoulders and off camera, using the actor’s head movement as a reference of where the head should fly.

Hope this helps.

[Robert Storm]

ahh cool thanks alot! I didn’t know that stuff about lightsabers cauterizing wounds.
Thanks for the tips on setting it up. That just leaves me with 1 more question. When it comes off, how far out should the head go? Should it just fall straight down on top of the character? Or will it fall a few feet out? If so, will the motion path look kinda parabolic? Or does it all depend on how he’s moving when his head gets cut off, and I’ll just have to eyeball it?

[Randall Murphy]

You need to check out his tutorials then, he’s got a product that has blood splatter and tells you how to do it…pretty cool stuff. His products are reasonably priced.