So that I could showcase my abilities in After Effects and Premiere Pro I decided to make a short film with a extensive use of visual effects. I wanted to use my contextual research on ralph McQuarrie to create a similar aesthetic scene in his concept art. A vital part of filming was location scouting, which involved finding places that have similar scenery to those scene in Star Wars. I found a forest which had very tall, slender trees; these provided the desired appearance for shooting. Another factor I had to consider was props/costume sourcing. I managed to come across a black cloak that looked similar to a Jedi robe and I used a plastic lightsaber with a removeable blade for different situations. Below are a few test shots I took in full costume on location. I later edited these to make the lightsaber look realistic with reflections in Photoshop. I used these shots to decide what length and colour I wanted the blade to have.
After about an hour of shooting I started the very lengthy editing process. To order all of my shots I imported them into Premiere Pro and then used the Adobe Dynamic link to edit the clips individually. A problem I came across was that I recorded the videos in 4K at 60 frames per second. This would have been perfect if I was doing something without VFX as it would make the footage look clear and run smooth. Having the footage at 60 frames per second meant that I would have to do twice the amount of work in After Effects when tracking the lightsaber and so in Premiere Pro I used the posturize time tool to change the footage to 30 frames per second.
To get the visual of a lightsaber I used the Video Co-pilot Saber plug-in for After Effects. While this was easier to do than rotoscoping every frame it still was a time-consuming challenge to line up the effect with the plastic lightsaber blade. For the lightsaber I had to key frame the base and the tip of the blade every few frames. In the screenshot below the small grey points show each time I had to manually move the effect.
I had a lot of trouble with the effect lagging behind or in front of the physical blade. To fix this I had to go through a tedious process of searching each frame for the misplacement.
One of the key tools I used to make the blade look 'alive' was flicker intensity. by turning this setting up it made the blade look as if it were pulsating with energy.
For the shots where the lightsaber passes behind my character I had to create multiple masks which were keyframed to hide the blade at certain points in the clip. In the screenshot below the coloured shapes on the footage indicate where I drew masks.
The most complicated shot I made was where the character deflect blaster bolts with the lightsaber. This shot was just over 2.5 seconds long and took me over 2 hours to edit. Once I had tracked the lightsaber blade I had to animate four blaster bolts which come into frame and ricochet of the blade. As well as this I added a spark effect when the bolt made contact with the blade. Many of these effects happen so quickly that they are hardly noticeable but I wanted to complete this shot as I had spent so long on it already.
When creating the title card I wanted to incorporate the lightsaber hilt into the text. To do this I replaced the 'I' in 'Jedi' with a stylized version of the hilt made using the shape tools.
With the title text complete I imported it as a PNG into After Effects. I wanted to make a title sequence inspired by the Star Wars: the clone wars intro. Firstly I added a space background and made the title emit a green glow as a motif to the Jedi's green lightsaber.
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