This week’s Adobe After Effects tutorial comes from the wonderful Videocopilot. You will need to shoot some footage of your own to complete the tutorial, and setting up a green/blue screen that’s large enough to cover the action is really the most difficult part, but the results are definitely worth it.
The tutorial uses step-by-step video instructions and shows you how to add effects onto video footage and simulate a car hitting a pedestrian. It takes place in a suburban street and involves a car driving along and slamming into a pedestrian from the side. The pedestrian falls dramatically onto the bonnet and is pushed along out of frame by the car. To add to the realism, the car bonnet crumples and you can even download a sound file from the website that helps with the illusion.
This tutorial can be applied to any situation, so long as your vehicle drives in from one side of the frame and out on the other side. It could be a truck or a bus, it doesn’t really matter because your actor is never in danger, so you can just drive whatever vehicle you have into and out of the frame.
When we tried the tutorial, we used a green bed sheet to replicate the blue screen, and two people stood on either side and held it, but because of perspective, it was quite small in the frame and our actor used a lot of movement in his fall and so parts of his body overshot the sheet and had to be masked out manually, because we couldn’t key them out. A little more time consuming, but it still worked quite well.
It’s also a good idea to use a tripod when filming your actor and don’t move anything when you film the blank plate so that the two plates line up perfectly.
Providing you are mindful of these few issues, it’s a surprisingly simple tutorial that produces really professional results. Once we had shot the footage, the effect really only took a couple of hours to impliment. The only thing that could take you a long time is extracting your actor from their background plate. It all depends on how clean your footage is and how well your green screen worked on the day. The technique demonstrated in the tutorial is clever, simple and effective.
If you need a road accident shot in your project, or just want to improve your keying skills, this is a great tutrial to try. We had a lot of fun with it. We hope you enjoyed our Adobe After Effects tutorial of the week. Please leave a comment.
