We’ve had quite a few people ask us about how we did the effects on the Oh No! video. I thought I’d write a blog explaining a few things that will hopefully inspire people with as little talent as us to try something new.

I guess this might be boring for everyone that has no interest in making special effects so if you are one of those people, here is a picture of Rowan dressed as Wizard Whitebeard to hopefully make your trip to this blog worthwhile.

Anyway. When we decided to do the whole Scott Pilgrim tribute video we had absolutely no clue what we were doing. Honestly, we had hardly touched any effects software but we figured that our massive brains and superior technical intellect would help us learn how to do it in no time. If you haven’t used After Effects before, I suggest getting hold of it somehow.

The first thing I would suggest is to visit Video Copilot and do some of their introductory tutorials. http://www.videocopilot.net/basic/

Although they might seem boring, you pick up a lot of information on how the software works, what all the buttons and menus do and also how to do very basic effects straight away. Although it might not seem it in some places, the effects on our Oh No! video are really simple.

Then, for the video, we basically watched through Scott Pilgrim and picked out the parts we wanted to copy. For the bits we wanted to include we would watch the relevant scene from the film over and over, frame by frame, trying to work out how they did them. Most of the time we found it was fairly straight forward and just involved a bit of trial and error and a lot of patience. I spent a lot of time doing this:

To use an example, the text was relatively easy to do. Just write some text, adjust the properties of it until it looks right, then animate it in 3D space using keyframes. If you wanted to put your text behind people you’d just need to use the rotoscoping tool on the person you wanted to place it behind. There are a lot of rotoscoping tutorials on the internet. It’s a REALLY handy tool to know how to use and very straightforward.

I’m trying not to go into too much detail here as if I started doing that I’d end up writing pages and pages. But I’d say that pretty much any effect is achievable on your crappy home computer. You just need patience and persistence when something seems like an impossible task. Watch an effect you like over and over and try and copy it. There’s often numerous ways to achieve the same effect so there’s usually not a ‘right’ or a ‘wrong’ way to do things.

Other things:

- There are hundreds and hundreds of tutorials on the internet. Do as many as you can.

- If you can’t figure something out, just do a search. Chances are somebody has written about it somewhere on the internet.

-  Join a good forum and ask people when you are stuck. Creative Cow is an amazing site and the people who regularly post are very helpful. You should see some of the dumb crap I asked on there. http://library.creativecow.net/tutorials/adobeaftereffects

That’s about it really. This blog has probably led you to the correct conclusion that we have no idea what we are talking about and that we are the world’s worst at computer effects. 

If you need anything more specific, drop us an email and hopefully we can help.

BYE!