After Effects - Making a Lightsaber Cast Light

Hi

I have been fooling around with lightsabers and After Effects. I'm using a digital camera taking stills of people holding the hilts. I rotoscope the picture Next I cranked the brightness of the original image down to -100, and adjusted the color balance of the shadow and midtones as necessary to make it look like the saber is casting the light in an otherwise dark room. Great, works wonderfully. But, how can I make it so that the saber will cast light anyway, without having to rely on changing the color balance of the entire picture? For example, if I have two sabers, I want them to cast different lights. Or if I have the saber unignited, I want maybe just a blue shadow over everything (to make it look dark). How would I do this?

Thanks in advance,

 

Well I'm no expert in After Effects so I'm not sure how you would do what you're talking about. Perhaps making one layer red and the other layer blue plus your regular layer on the bottom and make a feathered mask on the colored layers. Just an idea. A method I think would work really well is using Photoshop. Export each frame individually then pull them into photoshop and render lighting effects. That's probably what I'd do. Maybe an expert could give you some better ideas. I'm just brainstorming here.

 

What about using an actual light (or lights) projected onto your lightsaber location itself? You can do a large area fill light or tight spots to give the impression of movement, say when the saber crosses your face. Ep II had some great examples of this.

 

Perhaps you could make a circular mask of the colour you want, that covers areas you want the light to be cast. then make it very transperant.