Shadow Effects

[David Bogie]

This is highly advanced AE work. I suggest you either hire it done, find someone on your production team who already knows how to use AE, find a 3D animation artist, or reshoot the scenes.
Creating the shadow template is easy and can be done in Photoshop or as a precomp in AE using the venetian blind wipe effects as a still frame. You can use this layer as a gobo and shine a 3D light through it or you can distort it and apply it to your bed using blend modes. The difficulty is in trying to simulate the 3D space. It gets even more difficult trying to mimmic movement within the movie. for this you also need to understand displacement mapping.

And that’s just the mechanical part. Making it look good, selling it to your audience, is going to be nearly impossible.

(The following is sarcasm, try not take it personally) Once you figure out how to create the blind effect, check back in with us and we will attempt to guide you through placing 3D distortions into a 2D comp. Meantime, open the online AE manual to the sections on 3D and try to imagine how we will synopsize 500 pages of super complex information into a few paragraphs of forum posts.

Reshooting with practical lighting effects will be cheaper and easier.

bogiesan

[Mike Clasby]

For the Venetian blinds, I’d do this:

Add a new Black Solid. Then turn the black solid’s eyeball off so you can see what you’re doing, and draw a mask with the Pen Tool (still have the solid selected) the shape of the shadow you want for the Venetian blinds. Turn the eyeball back on. Add this effect Transition>Venetian Blinds.

Venetian Blinds: Tweak all the parameters to get the look you want. You can also reduce opacity for the solid (T) is you want the shadows lighter. Feather the Mask (MM) as needed.

Now adding the shadow (Soild) to the footage is done by tracking and parenting, methinks. Andrew has a tut where he adds effects to a Demon Face, and Sun Glasses. Your Venetian Blinds will be to the Bed, what the Sunglasses are to the Demon’s Face. So you’ll do some tracking, the art is in choosing good track points (and having footage that’s trackable) to Stabilize the footage. Then you’ll precompose, and add the movement back with expressions and pickwhipping. Fear not, Andrew walks you thru this. Sounds crazy, but now you can just parent your shadow to the original footage and your shadow will stick like glue to the video. Andrew’s tut here:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/Demon_Face_Warp/demon_face_warp.htm

You can download the project, here:

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials.html?id=11

This is Advanced stuff, but if you take it step by step, you can do it.

As an alternative to Transition Venetian Blinds you can do similar stuff with Grid.

[Mike Clasby]

Oh, you said a person lying in bed.. trickier to displace the Shadow, but try this.

On the Solid with the Venetian Blinds, try adding Distort>Bulge (can be oval shaped by having a much larger Horizontal or Vertical Radius). Or a few instances of Spherize (with different Centers) to get the warping of the Venetian Blinds over the body.

So you could have Bulge for the Torso and Spherize for the head.

You can rotate Bulge with this nifty solution from Dan:

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/890103

Or without the expression (perish the thought!), just set on Distort>Transform>Rotation to -30 and the Transform below to -30 (30 as an example, use your own number as needed). Remember Bulge is sandwiched in between the Transforms.

For the displacement you can also use Mesh Warp or Displacement Map (but that’s a whole new Ball Game, Click on Aharon”s head at the top of the main page and scroll down for 3 tuts on Displacement Mapping). You might also try Liquify.

With a little clever use of Bulge and Spherize you should get what you want and not have to get into the bizarre (but fun) world of Displacement Mapping.

[Rodga68]

Alrighty, thanks for all the advice.
I’ll definately give it a go, i usually learn quite fast on these things and I’m hoping so seeing as a lot of what you all said didn’t mean too much to me right now. 😛

I’ll check back when I have done it or have given up.
Thanks again.