Harnessing Electricity

Tips N Tricks
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Harnessing Electricity
Bending the new Artbeats electric effects collections to your will.
by Chris & Trish Meyer, Crish Design
Long-time users of Artbeats footage are probably familiar with their
ReelExplosions and ReelFire collections, which were based on combustible themes. So after you’ve blown things up and set them on
fire, what do you do for an encore? Apparently, electrocute them.
Artbeats has now created a series of collections – Electric Arcs,
Lightning Arcs, Lightning & Clouds, Lightning Strikes, and High
Voltage Scenarios – in partnership with kVA Effects (www.teslacoil.
com), who are in the business of creating high voltage and theatrical
lightning effects (think 60-foot electric arcs shooting through the air)
for video, film, and live presentations. Of course, the resulting clips
are ready to be used as-is, full-frame. But you can really extend their
usefulness with a few blending and distortion tricks, which we’ll
outline here.
Figure 1a
Figure 1b
Out of the Black
Most of these clips were shot against a black background, and are
just begging to be composited on top of other footage to add electricity and mayhem to a scene. In the Tips N Tricks article Managing
Transparency Part 1, we discussed a number of ways to creatively
blend clips shot on black; we’ll give a thumbnail review of those
techniques here.
First off, the thing not to do is to reach for a luma key effect to drop
out the black background: This almost always leaves a black fringe
around the action part of the shot. Some of the clips – particularly
in the Lightning Strikes collection – are provided with companion
matte movies, which already contain alpha channel (transparency)
information. They can be combined with the original color clip using
the Track Matte feature in Adobe After Effects, an Image Mask in
Apple Motion, or other similar techniques.
If the clip you want to use doesn’t have a matte supplied, or if you
want a more transparent look than the matte provides, apply an “unmult” type effect that makes the black areas transparent, full-strength
white or colored areas opaque, and those in between semi-transparent. The most famous of these effects is Unmult, which comes with
Knoll Light Factory; another option is the free Xmult plug-in from
FAN Development (www.fandev.com/xmult.html).
Figure 1: Most of the high voltage clips are shot against black (a). If
you use a luma key to remove the black, the result is often unpleasing
edges, including a dark fringe (b). An unmult-style plug-in creates
a nicer alpha channel (c), or you can use blending modes such as
Add to make the electric arc interact with the scene (d). Clips from
Artbeats Lightning Arcs and Gears.
Figure 1c
Figure 1d
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Beyond just creating transparency for an overlay effect, you can
use blending modes to make the high-voltage clips interact with the
footage underneath. As they were shot on black, try Add, Screen,
Color Dodge, and other similar modes to add illumination to a scene.
Conversely, to have the flashes in the voltage footage reveal portions
of another shot, use Multiply, Linear Burn, or similar modes.
Figure 2a
Figure 2b
Figure 2c
Logo Treatments
Several of the high voltage clips are generated from or around distinct shapes, such as a circle or rectangle. As this is the general shape
of many logos, these clips become candidates to electrify your logos.
The trick comes in matching the shape and size of the electric effects
to the logos.
Let’s tackle circular shapes first. Clips EAR101 through 106 from
the Electric Arcs collection all come from a central circular shape;
just center them over your logo and apply using a blend mode like
Screen. What if your logo needs to appear larger than the original
shape? You have a few options.
The simplest is scaling up the Electric Arc clip to match – but too
much scaling can result in a degraded image. If your final output is
standard definition video, you can see if the corresponding high-def
clip is available from Artbeats.com; that will give you a lot more
pixels to play with. Another option is to use a high-quality scaling
plug-in, such as Digital Anarchy’s ReSizer (www.digitalanarchy.
com/resizer/resizer_main.html). If the logo has an oval shape, scale
the Electric Arc clip differently in the X and Y axes as needed.
A more creative approach is to use a distortion plug-in – such as a
bulge – to inflate the center of the Electric Arc clip to match logo,
while keeping the rays beyond the center at their original size. This
gives you more options, such as scaling down the Electric Arc clip
overall to form a tight set of arcs around the logo, but still bulging
the center larger to match the logo. If the center is overwhelming the
logo, mask it out, or select an alternate clip (such as EAR106) that
has the weakest center.
Figure 3a
Figure 2d
Figure 3b
Figure 2: “Flash” clips – such as LCL125 from Lightning & Clouds
(a) – can be used over ordinary footage (b) to either overexpose it
using blending modes such as Add (c), or reveal it using modes such
as Multiply (d). Background clip from Lifestyles -Mixed Cuts.
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Figure 3c
Figure 3: Many of the clips in the Electric Arcs collection radiate
from a circular center (a). To make these interact with a circular
logo, use a blending mode such as Screen and either scale them up
to fit (b), or use a distortion effect such as a bulge (c). Background
clip from Artbeats Liquid Abstracts.
Masking can also help tame the edges when centering an electric
effect over a logo. Whereas the arcs in the EAR101-106 clips do not
quite reach the edge of the frame, the very cool HVS114 clip in the
High Voltage Scenarios collection does reach the edges – which can
look a bit funky if you want to scale down the clip and use it less
than full frame. Create a circular mask around the source of the arcs,
and increase the mask feather parameter to create a soft fall-off. If
the amount of feather you like makes the mask now reach beyond the
edges of the image, either scale down the mask shape, or in After Effects use the Mask Expansion parameter to reign in the mask’s size.
What if your logo has a rectangular shape? It so happens that a
couple of the Electric Arcs clips – such as EAR107 and 138 – flow
around a rectangular outline. Again, you can scale and mask as
needed to fit them around your logo.
Figure 4a
Figure 4b
Once you’ve got the general idea down, you can use other distortion
effects to create different looks. For example, many of the clips in
the Electric and Lightning Arcs collections have electric arcs emanating out from a central point. Place them in front of or behind your
logo, and use distortions such as twirls to bend the arcs around the
logo. You can also take some of the full-frame arc clips from these
collections and compress them into cool underscores or lower-third
bars by reducing just their Y scale.
Figure 4c
Figure 4d
Figure 4: Electric arcs – such as LAR125 from Lightning Arcs (a)
can be twirled to wrap around circular logos (b). Full-screen arcs
such as EAR114 from Electric Arcs (c) – can be scaled to form
underscores or other bars (d); if you use more than one copy, offset
them in time so the bars look different. Full-screen Background clip
from Artbeats Liquid Abstracts.
Bottled Lightning
We’ve suggested just simple distortion effects so far; more complex effects allow more complex results. One of our favorites is
Reshape in After Effects. You create two mask shapes for the layer
to be distorted, and it takes the content contained within one shape
and warps it to fit inside the other shape. If your first mask shape is
the same size as the high-voltage clip, you can use it to appear to fit
this clip inside an object in an underlying piece of video. You can
also do more complex reshapings, such as taking the Jacob’s ladder
effect in clips EAR 122 or 123 from Electric Arcs or HVS117 from
High Voltage Scenarios and warping it to follow along a pair of TV
antenna “rabbit’s ears” or any other pair of wires.
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Figure 5: More complex distortion effects such as Reshape in After
Effects Professional may be used to fit arcs (a) into other shapes
(b). Jacob’s ladder effects (c) can be stretched to follow television
rabbit’s ears (d). Video clips from Artbeats Electric Arcs and Liquid
Abstracts; spaceship and rabbit ears from Classic PIO Partners
Nostalgic Memorabilia and Classic Televisions & Gadgets.
Figure 5a
Figure 5b
Figure 5c
Figure 5d
Distortions can work both ways: In addition to warping electric arcs
to fit into other footage, you can warp other footage to fit into one
of the more complex high-voltage clips. For example, several of the
clips in High Voltage Scenarios feature lightning striking a satellite television dish. The dish Artbeats shot is nicely generic with no
brand logo; if you want to add your own brand logo, consider gently
warping it with a spherize effect to better fit the curve of the dish.
At Your Fingertips
A few of the clips in the High Voltage Scenarios collection show
electric arcs extending from a person’s fingers. What if you want to
add electric arcs to your own footage? With a little work, you can
easily recreate this effect.
First, select one or two clips with arcs that come from a central point,
such as EAR113, 119, or 139 from Electric Arcs, or LAR132 from
Lightning Arcs. If the arcs are not coming from the exact center of
the footage, move the clip’s anchor point to line up with the source.
Then track the fingers (or nose, or whatever object you want the arcs
to come from) using Adobe After Effects Professional, Autodesk
combustion, or Silhouettefx Roto. Apply the tracking data to the
Artbeats clips so that they follow the fingers in your footage. Finally,
scale and rotate the clips to taste; if your program supports 3D space
or has a 3D plug-in, you can rotate them in 3D to make them appear
to shoot out at almost any angle you like. Again, consider using a
blend mode such as Add to make them seem to illuminate the underlying scene.
Figure 6a
Figure 6b
Figure 6: The dramatic electricity-from-fingertips clips in High Voltage Scenarios (a) may give you ideas for your own composites. Grab
a couple of clips from Electric or Lightning Arcs, and use motion
tracking to make electricity flow from the desired points in your own
footage. Background clip from Artbeats Desktop Technology.
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Zooming Out
There are but a few ideas of how to employ the neat clips in these
collections. Note that many of these clips were shot in super slow
motion, which means you can cleanly speed them up to match the
pace that works best for your job. Also, a good number of them are
available in high definition versions; if your project is in standard
definition, having the high def clips around gives you extra flexibility, such as the ability to “zoom in” on a portion of an overall shot
without having to scale the clip past 100%, which would otherwise
degrade it. Have fun, and remember to stay grounded!
Chris and Trish Meyer are the founders and owners of Crish
Design, an award-winning motion graphics studio that has
created a wide variety of work for film, broadcast, corporate
events, and special venues. They are one of the original development sites for After Effects, and have two books currently in
print: Creating Motion Graphics and After Effects Apprentice.
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