digital_glitch_effects

7/29/2019 digital_glitch_effects

1/4


2/4

Summer 2006 |65

When making animations for your

video projects in 3D packages do

you ever find that everything starts to look

a little too clean? The current vogue for an

all-digital workflow means perfect fidelity

throughout the process, but sometimes you

need to roughen things up a bit.

Analogue technologies, such as cine film

and VHS video, had inherent flaws. Film

has a grain and video creates distortion, buteveryone loves a little bit of glitch from

directors such as Chris Cunningham to

musicians like Telefon Tel Aviv, Chris Clark

and Autechre. I also have an unearthly love

for anything distorted or broken. I have no

idea where this love comes from, and why

when I hear and see static the hairs on the

back of my neck stand to attention.

In this tutorial Ill show you how to

tweak your footage to give it a grungy

feel. Youll do this by adding camera shake

and flicker, before tinting and grading the

footage to give a bit more impact. This

tutorial is all about using plug-ins to your

advantage including Boris Continuum 3,

EssentialEffectsandTinderbox3. Notonly will your workflow become much

faster, but you might find this opens you

up to a different way of thinking when it

comes to your post work in AfterEffects.Its all about making plug-ins do the hardwork for you...

1Once After Effectsis up and running, goto the Composition tab at the top of thescreen and hit New Composition. I renderedmy 3D footage at half PAL res, so thiscomposition should be the same. Make surethe Preset drop-down is set to Custom andthe width and height to 384x288. Set theAspect Ratio to Square Pixels and theduration to 15 seconds.

2Before you import the footage, set upthe necessary folders within After

Effectsto keep track of the elements. Clickthe small folder icon at the bottom of theproject float and name the newly createdfolder Footage. This is where youll storeyour imported edits. For larger projects, setup the following: Footage, Solids, Audio,Vector and PSD.

Illustration and tutorial by Chris James Hewitt

www.dstrukt.com

DOWNLOAD

TIME NEEDED

1 hourINFO

Chris JamesHewitt is afreelancemotiondesigner and

art director currentlybased in Covent Garden,London. Working underhis Dstrukt guise, Chrishas produced work fora mix of high-end clientsscattered across theglobe, including MTVNetworks Europe,Channel Five, the BBC,Digitalvision and RollsRoyce, receiving criticalacclaim for both onlineand traditional media.Find out more atwww.dstrukt.com.

DIGITAL GLITCH EFFECTSAFTER EFFECTS

Dstrukts Chris James Hewitt believes third-party plug-ins can change the way you work in After Effectsforever.Here he reveals a great way to create realistic glitch effects to roughen-up your moving image work

3Now go to File>Import and browse thedirectory containing the included footage

from the CD. I rendered from 3ds Maxas aseries of QuickTimemovies. Click the firstimage from the sequence, hit the TIFFSequence tab and press Open. After Effectshas now imported the sequence of images asa merged clip. Import all the different editsand arrange them into the correct folder.

4I used three of the four edits to composethis piece. You should start by dragging

one of the clips into the timeline and thenhitting O on your keyboard to see the bufferhead go to the end of that clips duration.Arrange the remaining edits together,

ensuring that each clip starts at the endof another to avoid overlapping.

TUTORIAL|
ftp://ftp.futurenet.com/pub/arts/zinio/art126_glitch.zipftp://ftp.futurenet.com/pub/arts/zinio/art126_glitch.zip


3/4

66| Summer 2006

5You now have a base structure. By hitting 0 on your number padyou can RAM preview the animation so far. Its very linear and

theres room to add some dynamics. Add an Adjustment Layer. Whenyou apply an effect to an ordinary layer, the effect applies only to thatlayer. However, an effect can exist independently if you create anAdjustment Layer for it.

AFTER EFFECTS

6 With the AdjustmentLayer selected, go tothe Effects palette andselect Essential EffectsCamera Flash (EE CameraFlash). The default valueis too high, so drop theIntensity down to 5 per cent,leaving the Saturation at 0.0 and the colour White. The footage will have ableached out feel to it something I class as global effect, meaning itsapplied to everything in the composition and isnt keyframed in any way.

7Next up is one ofthe more intense

effects youll beapplying to your project.Create anotherAdjustment Layer andget some camerashake on the go! SelectBoris ContinuumsFilm Damagefromthe Effects paletteand ensure that Colour,Flicker and Shake areall turned on. Choose

a Tint Colour andincrease the amountto 30.00, ensuring theBrightness, Contrastand Saturation are allset to 0.0.

8Next, tweak the Flicker values. You can change these to your taste, but here I used a valueof 20.00 for both the amount and speed. This will give you a steady and not too over-

powering strobe effect.

9To add the camera shake, set the X-and Y-axes to 5.00 with a speed of 50.00.

Although the Film Damageplug-in is amazing,I tend not to use the shake too often. Themovements can be quite rigid and it lacksa lot of motion blur. To make your own, trylinking your footage to a Null layer and adjustthe position values every two to four frames.

10Before you add your transitionaleffect, focus a little more on the grade

of your piece. Colour grading is the processof altering and enhancing the colour of amotion picture or television image eitherelectronically, photo-chemically or digitally.Rather than using third-party plug-ins, youcan do this manually using After EffectsColour Correction tools.

11Start by selecting Curvesfrom the Effects palette.

The Curves effect adjusts thetonal range of an image. Youcan use Levels to do this, butCurves gives you more control.Click in both the bottom left ofthe graph and the top right toadd two control points.Carefully adjust these pointsuntil you find a suitable rangefor your footage. You mightfind you need to add more thantwo points in order to get thedesired effect.

In your compositionwindow you can choosewhat resolution yourwork is viewed at.This can be extremelyuseful when workingwith heavy file sizes suchas live footage, plug-ins

and high resolutionPSDs. Try using half andthird to help speed upyour workflow.

WORK AT LOW-RES

|TUTORIAL


4/4Summer 2006 |67

12Next select the Tint effect from yourEffects palette. This alters an images

colour information. Select your colour ofchoice from the Map To Black channel andleave the white to gently add some colour tothe middle of your footage. Dont forget todrop the tint amount to roughly 15 per centso you dont overpower the scene.

13The Colour Balance effect changesthe amount of red, green and blue

colour in a layer. This is where you can pumpcolour into footage using the Shadows,Midtones and Highlights. Experiment withadjusting the values and see what worksbest. Ive only tweaked the Blue Shadows by-12 and the Blue Highlights by -30. Thisturned my blacks into a muddy brown colour.

14

The Levels effect remaps the range

of input colour levels on to a newrange of output colour levels, and alsochanges the gamma correction curve. Playaround and see what works best for yoursource footage. I increased the input blacka little to deepen the look and feel.

16So far you should have a well-structured, graded and funky piece of

motion design, but the piece lacks transitionsbetween each clip. Create a new AdjustmentLayer and cut the Duration down to onesecond. Drag the layer so that the midpointis directly between your first two clips.

17In the Effects palette,select Tinderboxs

Bad TVplug-in. Choose BadTV from the Preset drop-down and make sure Tint isselected. Now, instead ofadjusting the plug-ins value,edit the Adjustment Layerstransparency to make theeffect fade in and out. Hit Iso the buffer head goes tothe start of the layer, hit Tand add a keyframe for thetransparency. Set this to0.0. Move the buffer headto the midpoint of the layerand set the Transparency to100. Hit O, keyframe to 0.0and hit Preview.

18Duplicate thetransition layer

and place it inbetween

the following clips to finishthe film off. One idea mightbe to tweak the Bad TVvalues for each transition.This way each edit willdiffer slightly.

When working with lotsand lots of layers, dontforget to use Shy Layers.By ticking the small faceicon on the selected layeryou can now make thisand any other layer shy or hidden. Simply turn

on Shy Layers in theTimeline. This is a greatfeature to use if youreworking with highlycomplex and/orscattered compositions.

SHY LAYERS

TUTORIAL|

15Now for the final stage of the grading process, adding Hue/Saturation from the Effectspalette. This effect adjusts the Hue, Saturation and Lightness of individual colour

components in an image. Drag the colour wheel and watch how your footage changes colour.You can also adjust how much colour is pushed through using the Saturation slider.

digital_glitch_effects

Documents