6 Stikfas Animation Tutorial

This took me forever. Well, it took me about 6-7 hours to edit, as opposed to the normal 2 or 2.5 hours. If anything, I’m getting to know my way around After Effects quite well.

First off, I am using this website to learn After Effects. It’s a great website full of wonderful tutorials:
http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/all/

Now, the tutorial I used to learn lightsabers was this one:
http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/light_sabers_v2/

The only trouble is that the presets that you can download to make lightsabers is for version 7 of After Effects, and I have version CS3 (which is newer but not as new as CS4). So there are a few things that don’t work and I know the lightsabers are off.

For one, the lightsabers shouldn’t be completely round at the bottom. Second, a blur is automatically put in so that instead of a straight line, there should be a wedge for a white core. Other than that, however, doing the lightsabers was easy peasy. It was a simple matter of rotoscoping through all the film.

What was the hard part? Masking the lightsabers as they went behind Manny and Maggie! And the reason it was so difficult was because I still have to understand the pen tools in After Effects, and secondly, I deleted 2 hours worth of work without knowing it. *sigh* That was because of my lack of knowledge with the pen tools and how shapes are made.

For sound effects, I pulled them off of theForce.net:
http://www.theforce.net/fanfilms/postproduction/soundfx/saberfx_fergo.asp

Their website is a bit harder to navigate than I remembered. But I knew it was in the fanfilm section so I just went there.

As you may have figured out, these animations are tutorials for myself, as opposed to the general public. Well, more like test films. I still need to practice my sword fighting stop motion, so expect a few of this still! 😀