Jedi Council Forums - "Force" Lightning

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Author	Topic: "Force" Lightning - Test and Tutorial
-Spiff- Registered: Jun '05	Date Posted: 8/28/05 11:11pm Subject: "Force" Lightning - Test and Tutorial - Date Edited: 8/28/05 11:12pm (1 edits total) Edited By: -Spiff-
	*Disclaimer* I did not say "good" tutorial. I did not reference the Star Wars films at all to do this effect. I am not trying to make canon Force Lightning here, but something I think looks interesting, close, and hopefully, appealing in a "I'm electrocuting you" kind of way. Without further adieu: Here's the test (2.7 MB) Here are some grabs: And as promised... On Set - Buy cheap party strobe light. Preferably more than one. More than one will give some additional angles to the light as the lightning flickers... and will make it look less fake. - Try to aim the strobe to minimize unwanted shadows. Strive to give the illusion that the light is coming from where the lightning is supposed to be... or be hitting. - Turn on strobe light when shooting. Post Production - Get footage into AE. You might as well follow Ryan's new lightsaber compositing workflow. - Apply the "Advanced Lighting Filter" (you don't have it if you bought AE Std) to a black solid or an adjustment layer. Turn the opacity of the "glow" to zero. The built-in glow sucks. - Animate, rotoscope and tweak to taste* - Make a white solid layer, place this above the lightning layer on this layer, mask the contact points on your finger tips with little feathered circles. This will give a nice little end to the lightning tip and merge it with your fingers better. Be sure to follow your lightning around. - Make an additional copy of the footage layer (place this layer above the original footage layer). - Copy the masks from the white solid to the new footage layer, feather them more, and change this to "add" - this will give a "sub-surface" like glow - suggesting some heat in your skin - colour correct, colour balance, add sound, etc. - I made a bit of an additional flare when the lightning starts to give a little panache. You can do that too of you like. I used a radial blur tool for mine. *There is no real tutorial for animating. Just try to imagine you're the lightning, and where you will go next. Here are a few tips: - Do not keep the opacity of the lightning constant. Vary it as much as you like, and try to make sure your lighting is doing something big whenever a strobe hits. Work with the strobes here to sell the effect. - There are several different types of lightning in the package. This footage uses almost exlusively "striking" until the very end, at which point "breaking" dominates the shot. - Real lightning doesn't wiggle up and down like most force lightning tests... it arcs - and it does so incredibly quickly. The reason lightning makes thunder is that it travels much much faster than the speed of sound. Just as you wouldn't show bullets travelling (unless in bullet time... we'll get there), neither would you show lightning travel. - That said, if you do have an excuse to show lightning traveling, don't try to wiggle your lighting. There's an excellent shot in The Matrix Revolutions during the SuperBrawl you should look at if you want to show lightning traveling. In order to achieve this motion in AE, you need to use the "core decay" tool. Animate the lighting between the emitter and the target as would normally - and then gradually decrease the core decay to get the lightning to travel out along its path. - There is a tendency for people to assign a bolt to every finger and we get a big glob of lightning looking all glob-like and globbing towards its opponent, where it forms a glob and globs on them. I used 2 lightning bolts in this test. The 2nd one only appears for the last 17 frames. 1 busy bolt looks cooler than 5 static ones. If you think the test sucks, disregard the tutorial, do better, and make your own. Other notes: - Pixel Magic has a nice tutorial with some PS Ripple thing that people are always looking for that doesn't exist. If you're doing long distance shots, there are some very nice compositing tips in Pixel's tutorial in terms of getting tasteful horizontal lens flares and what not. I suggest you look that up too if you're interested in doing force lightning. - I do all my glowy compositing with add modd. If you want your sabers and lightning and whatever else to look impotent and optically composited - use screen. -Spiff -----signature----- Eclipse SE now available: http://boards.theforce.net/fan_films/b10015/28647876/p1/?26 Spiff(x, \|x-Phi\|<small) = twitterpated FREE THE QUARKS!!!
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Master_Chikan Registered: Apr '05	Date Posted: 8/28/05 11:19pm Subject: RE: "Force" Lightning - Test and Tutorial
	That was awesome man! Out of curiosity, what type of strobe are you using? Most of the ones I'm finding available don't have an "on-the-fly" variable flash speed like yours seems to have... -----signature----- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- "Have you seen my baseball?!"
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Darth_Brad03 Registered: Sep '03	Date Posted: 8/28/05 11:22pm Subject: RE: "Force" Lightning - Test and Tutorial
	Great test. Amazing what the practical elements can add. I really like the look of the effect too. Can't wait to give it a go. Thanks for writing up a tutorial. -----signature----- Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience.
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Scott_M Registered: Oct '00	Date Posted: 8/28/05 11:24pm Subject: RE: "Force" Lightning - Test and Tutorial
	Preferably more than one. More than one will give some additional angles to the light as the lightning flickers... and will make it look less fake. Safety tip - If they're strobing at different rates they'll also minimise the chance of epileptic fits.
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-Spiff- Registered: Jun '05	Date Posted: 8/28/05 11:25pm Subject: RE: "Force" Lightning - Test and Tutorial
	Nothing "on the fly" about it. I thought it would be important too... but having 2 of them helps a little bit. These were 10 Watt "Globe micro stroboscope"s I bought at Canadian Tire for $12 each. My camera was running at 30 fps (CF30 for those with an FX1), with a 1/60th shutter... while the strobes cycled at about 10 Hz. Sometimes the camera would miss a strobe, other times not to give extra syncopation. I suspect though you could have perfectly even strobing, and if your animation was good enough, no one would notice. -Spiff -----signature----- Eclipse SE now available: http://boards.theforce.net/fan_films/b10015/28647876/p1/?26 Spiff(x, \|x-Phi\|<small) = twitterpated FREE THE QUARKS!!!
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brook_33 Registered: Dec '03	Date Posted: 8/28/05 11:27pm Subject: RE: "Force" Lightning - Test and Tutorial
	not bad spiff, but there wasn't very much lightning to judge. however, what i saw was good and very convincing. -----signature----- I'm one of those Fan Filmers that writes a ton of amazing scripts and never films them
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-Spiff- Registered: Jun '05	Date Posted: 8/28/05 11:34pm Subject: RE: "Force" Lightning - Test and Tutorial
	but there wasn't very much lightning to judge Alas - it doesn't take much lightning to kill a person. -Spiff -----signature----- Eclipse SE now available: http://boards.theforce.net/fan_films/b10015/28647876/p1/?26 Spiff(x, \|x-Phi\|<small) = twitterpated FREE THE QUARKS!!!
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DVeditor Title: Fan Films Evil Overlord (manager) Registered: Dec '01	Date Posted: 8/28/05 11:36pm Subject: RE: "Force" Lightning - Test and Tutorial
	-Spiff- posted on 8/29/05 11:11pm *Disclaimer* I did not say "good" tutorial. Seriously though, I think you did an great job on this. I'll be adding it to the sticky unless you have any objections. Keep up the good work! -----signature----- CK Hicks http://www.ckhicks.com http://dveditor.deviantart.com TFN on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2202937735
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Master_Chikan Registered: Apr '05	Date Posted: 8/28/05 11:50pm Subject: RE: "Force" Lightning - Test and Tutorial
	-Spiff- posted: Alas - it doesn't take much lightning to kill a person. ^^ LOL.. Classic -----signature----- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- "Have you seen my baseball?!"
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JDCT Registered: Feb '05	Date Posted: 8/29/05 12:09am Subject: RE: "Force" Lightning - Test and Tutorial
	That was a wicked shot! I love the effect. Not only does it look good but, the acting helps sell it too. I hate seeing someone who is completely motionless or just ignores the fact that lightning is coming from their hands... I was looking to do something like that myself, and I didn't realize I had the advanced lightning on my version of AE. Thanks for pointing it out! I have a strobe light, now all I need is a camera... I am pathetic... Great effect! -----signature----- "She's evil, that stone is evil, and evil plus evil can never equal good!" - The Iron Clad Diplomat (my D&D pally)
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majormorgan Registered: Jan '04	Date Posted: 8/29/05 12:41am Subject: RE: "Force" Lightning - Test and Tutorial
	Great tut Spiff, I'll be using that on a shot or two... And a great shot, nicely lit and brilliantly animated. Was that shot on your FX1? Can we see a still of the footage before any post was run on it? Just interested to see what you filmed and any colour correction you did. Btw, when's the baby due? Thanks, Richard -----signature----- I Shoot. Edit. Move it around. Reshoot some more. Edit that. In the end, why stick to what you have got from principle photography? This is the digital realm, so every pixel is up for grabs http://www.morganfilms.co.uk
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AidanOnasi Registered: Jul '05	Date Posted: 8/29/05 1:03am Subject: RE: "Force" Lightning - Test and Tutorial
	How about video tut? Text version is good also, but video si video, am I right? Thnx, this effect is really cool -----signature----- aka Martin Klekner Star Wars Shadows of the Past teaser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU-dJJGdUIk Power of the Dark Side: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEsqPk4ipGw ... 100.000 hits! Blog: http://mksvisualfx.blogspot.com/
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Jon Registered: Jul '04	Date Posted: 8/29/05 3:33am Subject: RE: "Force" Lightning - Test and Tutorial
	Wow, nicely done - very cool! -----signature----- Let's boogie! http://www.jonfx.com http://www.theforce.net/fanfilms/shortfilms/injured
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MasterZap Registered: Aug '02	Date Posted: 8/29/05 4:37am Subject: RE: "Force" Lightning - Test and Tutorial
	-Spiff- posted: I do all my glowy compositing with add modd. If you want your sabers and lightning and whatever else to look impotent and optically composited - use screen. And if you want them to burn into white way too quickly for realism, and cause all sorts of ugly banding artifacts (and only get a consisten result on black), use "Add" If you want to do it right, use eLin and then Add. Or Linear Dodge, which is sorta kinda the same thing-ish. Fabulous test, tho, Spiff. Although the problem was you could pick out the strobe rythm fairly easily, which gave me scary scary memories of the horrendeous time I had watching "Starship Troopers II", my that DVD never graze my player again, so help me Thor. (Whith such a great #1, how could they massacre #2 so immensly?) But Spiff... great acting, and great subtle lightning hops, arciness, music, face, light, and mood. /Z -----signature----- mental ray Tips blog - http://www.mentalraytips.com ZapTroNic Visuals - http://www.ZapTroNic.com Oldschool Homepage - http://www.Master-Zap.com FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER - http://twitter.com/masterzap
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Mister-X Registered: Apr '01	Date Posted: 8/29/05 6:52am Subject: RE: "Force" Lightning - Test and Tutorial
	Not wishing to go too far off-topic, but isn't eLin - at $495 - overkill for avoiding the problems that you mention, Zap? Surely you could just remove the sRGB (or whatever problematical) gamma, do the Add, then put the gamma back?
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FigChrystie Registered: Jan '04	Date Posted: 8/29/05 7:00am Subject: RE: "Force" Lightning - Test and Tutorial
	That's some cool stuff Spiff, and well done as hell. But I wouldn't call it force lightning. It's more reminiscent of thr baddie from Fantastic Four. -----signature----- Defunct.
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