Very specific “passing through a warp” effect

Adobe After Effects

Very specific “passing through a warp” effect

Posted by Jakob Fletcher on February 2, 2015 at 5:24 pm

Hello everyone,

I’m very glad to have found this forum, and hope someone will be able to help me out at least a little. I’m trying to create an effect very similar to the one in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OPLHgw54h4

The effect occurs between 0:05 – 0:14.

Now I’m very new to After Effects, having used it for only two days. However, having seen some YouTube videos and reading on the net I managed to learn a thing or two. Using a displacement map I managed to create a pretty good looking “warp”, somewhat similar like in the video. What I can’t figure out though is how to make the person pass through the warp, making it look similar like in the video.

What I did was, I created the displacement (warp) on a clean plate, and then added a separate layer with the person slowly walking a few steps at that position. Now trying to fuse these two layers together and get a good effect is turning out to be quite difficult. I love the effect of the person having a liquidy texture, bending/displacing the warp itself so to speak, and then after he fully appears, the warp behind him disappears through a shockwave.

I don’t have a green screen, so I guess the most important question is, is it possible at all to do it without a green screen?

If anyone can help me figure this out, I’d be very thankful.

Regards,
Jakob

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

Jakob Fletcher replied 11 years, 5 months ago 1 Member · 1 Reply
1 Reply

Jakob Fletcher
February 11, 2015 at 11:19 pm

Alright, no one has responded, but for those who are interested, here’s an update on the situation. So far I’ve come up with the perfect warp (without the actor going through), and I achieved this beautiful effect by using CC Glass.

I created a solid layer for the warp, did some masking & keyframing, then added some fractal noise and precomposed the layer, then made the layer invisible in the main composition. After that I added the CC Glass effect onto the background plate and used the precomposed layer as a bump map. With a little tweaking it turned out into a fantastic warp/ripple just like in the movie. There are also many possibilities of fine-tuning this effect, among other things by using the Liquify tool.

Now I’m working with the actor going through the warp. It needs a bit more work, but right now I’m getting the best results by using footage of the actor walking (+ fractal noise) as a displacement map applied on the background plate, and then adding the rest of the footage after the displacement, keyframing the mask to create a transition so that the person “breaks through” the ripple. In any case, this requires some rotoscoping in order to separate the person from the ripple behind him.

So yeah, it’s looking pretty good, but at the same time I’d also love to hear some advice from people who are more experienced than I am. I’m not sure if I could also make use of the Reshape effect to get the actor to come out of the warp.

Regards,
Jakob

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up

Creative Communities of the World Forums