How to Dodge like Agent Smith from the Matrix (After Effects Tutorial) #vfx #digital #digitaleffect #behindthescenes

Today I'm recreating this shot from the Matrix, with nothing but a tripod, a green screen, and a day at work. Let's go. Now you may be thinking, Caleb, why do you have a croc on your hand? And that's because this shot is actually part of a larger Matrix parody, where all the weapons are crocs. It's a collaborative short I did with Happy Kelly, and you should definitely check it out after this video. I'm shooting this on the site wall in my studio, but you could also get away with a pop-out green screen, a green cloth, or just a solid background you could roto off of. Now that we have all the performances, I'm gonna do one last take where all the different versions of me come back together to form one. Let's jump into After Effects. First, I need to select which performances I like the most, and I ended up choosing these ones. Now that I'm happy with my selection, I'm gonna go ahead and start rotoing and keying out these performances. With all these takes cut out, I do need just one performance of just my legs, and that's because in the clip, Agent Smith's upper body multiplies, but his legs are just one performance. At this point, I'm realizing I should have just rotoed the upper body since I don't need the legs from these other performances, so I'm gonna do that. Now we just need to repeat this process for all the different clips. I'm now gonna use Red Giant's Echo Space plugin to have this trail effect of multiple versions of me. Now, if you don't have this plugin, you can have the same effect by just duplicating your footage, offset each clone by just a frame, and then change the opacity of each clone so the trail begins to fade out. And that gives you this effect. All these different versions of me do have to come back together in the end in the same spot. And since there is a little bit of variation with each performance I did, I'm just gonna use some mesh warping to get me back to the same spot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm overexposed. And with all that together, this is what we have so far. And now it's time we open up Blender. Hey, uh, do you want pizza for lunch? I do. Do you? I do. Do you? Oh, I do. Oh, bless you. Thank you. Odoo. Oh, who? Odoo. Odoo, today's sponsor. Let's talk about that. Odoo is a one-stop shop business software solution. It's not just an intuitive website builder or top-of-the-line CRM or even an e-commerce solution. It's all of that and so much more. If you picture the standard way of running a business as a where sometimes the pieces don't even necessarily fit together. Odoo is more like a one-piece puzzle. The perfect solution is right out of the box. Speaking of box, pizza's here. With Odoo, you can create a stunning website with just a few simple clicks. You simply give prompts as to what you want to create, choose a color palette, and then select what pages you want on your site. From there, Odoo crafts professional templates for you to choose from. You want to go more custom? No problem. You can make adjustments to these templates to make your website as custom as you want. In fact, I just finished my site where I uploaded all the behind-the-scenes footage from the Matrix parody video we just filmed. It's live right now. You might be wondering, how much did that cost me? Nothing, because your first website is totally free with Odoo with all the support you need. And as the icing on the cake, they offer a free custom domain name for the first year. You got to just check it out for yourself and you can do that at the link in my description. Now back to the video. Okay, now it's time to open Blender. First, we have to delete the default cube and then bring it back. It's not right how we treat the default cube. I'm just kidding, let's delete it. Oh, light just went out. Guilty. At this point, I'm going to bring in a model of a human for scale and camera's position. Now I'm going to use this original shot as my basis for what I'm modeling. I'm going to start with a plane and I'm going to extrude the edges up to replicate the edge of the building. And I'll continue to add extra geometry to match all the walls and the structure of that rooftop. This side of the building is going to be a little bit taller because this is actually where the helipad is on the rooftop. Now it's time to model. Can you guess it? That's right, the stairs. I'm not really sure what's going on here. This is the basic geometry of the scene. So next up, I do need to add some shaders to texture everything, add a city HDRI for the background, and add the primary skyscraper right behind me. For all three of these things, I'm going to use BlenderKit. Now I'm going to create really simple geometry and projection map the video of myself onto it to have proper shadows on the roof. I'm also going to set my visibility to the camera off so that we just get the shadows and I can add myself back in with compositing. To match the original footage, I'm going to add a harsh sunlight as well to have these extreme shadows. I'm also going to add this model of an exhaust on the back left side of the shot to match the original a little bit better. And switching to cycles view, you can really see that HDRI come to life in the reflection of the building. However, the ground of the roof is a little too shiny, so I'm going to dial that back. In fact, let's just throw a whole other shader on it. Yeah, that looks a lot closer to the original. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what that thing was in the back right corner on the rooftop. I was looking at different rooftop air handlers and vents and exhausts, but now I'm thinking it's the base of some kind of crane. So I'm just going to model it myself. Add a little shiny rooftop shader and call it a day. Other than the colors, everything's looking pretty good to me. So I'm going to render this out to bring it to After Effects to get the job done. Back in After Effects, we're going to bring in this new background and the roto of myself. I'm going to add a curves adjustment to myself and then toggle on and off the visibility of one color at a time. That way I can tweak the RGB all separately to try to get the values of myself to match the background better. With that in place, you get this. I'm now going to add Lumetri to an adjustment layer, pull down the saturation and warm up the temperature, make the tint a bit more green, and then make a few more tweaks with the light settings. I'm now going to add the bevel and emboss layer style to give that sunlight a little bit more punch on the right hand side. And after tweaking some of the parameters, it looked like absolute garbage, but that's because it wasn't done. I'm going to duplicate the layer, make the effect super extreme, then add a fill effect, set it to black, and now we set the layer to screen. I'm going to duplicate my footage one more time and add a tint effect. On that light wrap layer, we're going to add a displacement map and use that tinted version of myself to inform how we want the light wrap to be displaced just a little bit. And here is what that looks like. I'm now going to add this video file of grain that I have and set it to overlay above all the footage. And staying within the theme of using Red Giant plugins, I'm going to use Magic Bullet Looks to get the style we're trying to go for. It's worth pointing out I am not sponsored by Red Giant, but I just really love their plugins a lot and I use them in almost all my videos. Inside the plugin, we're going to add some optical diffusion as well as halation. Back in the main comp, I'm going to pre-compose all the footage, but leave everything in regards to the final grade. And since the background is static, I'm actually going to add an adjustment layer and mask out the top half of the shot and dial back the contrast a little bit to match the original shot. I'm going to slightly scale up the footage and add a wiggle effect to match the original shot where you can see the film camera is not perfectly still. Now before I show you the results, as fun as it is recreating these shots from some of my favorite films, it's important to remember that the original VFX artists that worked on these movies had to become inspired and make these shots from scratch to become these things that we can recreate based off the work they've already done. So that being said, here is my recreation of this shot from The Matrix. I hope you enjoy. I hope you enjoyed watching that as much as I enjoyed making it. And to remind you, this is actually part of a larger collaboration I did with Happy Kelly where we made this Matrix Crocs parody. And now here's a montage of some fun behind the scenes moments of that. Wait, what am I doing? No, that was it. I think I overshot it. If you like this video, I'll make more like it. But if you subscribe, I'll make even more like it.