Create a Rhythmic ‘Beat-shake’ Effect
Tutorial Details
- Requirements: After Effects
- Difficulty: Intermediate
- Run Time: 23:51 min
Final Product What You'll Be Creating
Twice a month we revisit some of our reader’s favorite posts from back in the archives of Aetuts+. Today we’ll look at a tutorial from John Schlemmer that was first published in Feb 2009. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to make moving geometric shapes shake and shudder as if they’ve been moved by the vibrations of a beat. You’ll learn how to sync this effect to music and create the building blocks of a stunning and futuristic music video.
Make sure to watch the addendum posted below the tutorial where John explains how he used Photoshop and After Effects to create the organic background that is used throughout the piece.
John Schlemmer’s ‘Untitled’ Piece
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RSS readers: click post title to view preview video at AETUTS.
Instructions: Click ‘View Full-screen’ button (bottom right corner) to see this HD tutorial at maximum size. Click screen to pause, click again to play.
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Tutorial
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Background Addendum
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WOW!!!
stunning
Cool Tutorials
greate tuts i like it very much.
can u upload project file this tuts
Hi John. Thanks for the great tutorial. Please consider doing a tutorial on some of those great interference techniques from the longer video somethime.
cheers
Really great tut. thnx for sharing.
Great tut, thnx for sharing.
I like the effect. Will check tutorial later.
Holy F*! :)
Brilliant! Thanks for the tutorial :D
F*CKING Brilliant!
Geats Tuts!
but please don’t swallow… change the mic position.
Thank’s.
This is nice and all, but Video Copilot has the tool you need for this. Their plugin, Twitch, will do the same thing, but you can control everything so much more. Blur, light, slide, color, everything.
Cool, can you make this a multiple part tut and show us how to make the extended video
John….at 6:50 in the tutorial you say that you are going to include the song and the PNG’s for the project on the website….but I don’t see any. I made up my own, so it’s not a big deal but was wondering if you are going to put up the song?
Very cool tutorial….working my way through it right now!
Very cool! Thanks very much for sharing!
how did u make that back and forward motion in your longer video ? starting at 0:55
Just got done with it. Great effect….but I would have liked to see you put together more of the finished product. I know….being greedy. The shake effect is cool but it isn’t what makes your final product as sweet as it is.
Also…no project file. That would help.
Thanks John! I’d love to see more from you!
you should offer your videos as podcasts too. would be great.
Guys when he said the project files, he messed up, when AETUTS Launches the plus section all will be available to download.
hey nicetut.
For the wiggle you dont need to create a variable?
if you enter a simple wiggle(5,pickwiptheslidercontroller) it will do fine?No?
@tillimanjaro…..that is correct….or you can just type it out.
What I am interested in is the camera movement throughout the longer preview. What variable is he controlling? You can create camera movement through the triangle by increasing scale of the null but is there a better way?
I think probably the final touch that makes it interesting is the interference effect. For those wondering how to do it, one way is with Tinderbox plugins. They really work like a charm (I think it was called ‘bad tv’ or something)
Whoa! Very impressiv piece.
THAT WAS SICK!…..MY GODODNESS…..the final product was really really awesome…thank you so much…
WO HOO!
Stunning effect!
I wonder why you did not convert the audio to keyframes. If you first do some EQ-Settings and cut off all higher frequencies, you will get some very accurate keyframes for bass & Beats.
“ilb February 10th” CAN YOU TELL ME HOW TO DO THIS?
reilly@reillysaso.com
one of the greatest videos i have ever seen … Great one
reminds me alot of aphex twin or autechre. very reminescent of autechre videos. Love it!
oh man,i really like the Untitled piece! very nice!
WOW, amazing!
I’ve a title for this masterpiece: the “Butterfly Beat”.
=)
Thanks for sharing!!!!!
AH, there are a way to make the shapes “glow” with a formula, like you did with the shaker?
Thanks again!
cool Tuts, Thx
but i cant Set marker with RAM preview or audio-only preview
coz as i hit * key the RAM preview Stops
HELp psl :P
Dude like I said before AWESOME tutorial, but you see when I made that comment I hadnt seen the actual tutorial yet, I only saw the final video and assumed that in the tutorial thats exactly what we were going to see.
Just please show us how you did everything else…wed really love to see that…Im sure some other readers know how to do it and other ones such as myself can guess how you might have done it but we would still like to see the master do it…Im sure there’s a lot of tips and tricks and what nots we could get from you…
So pretty please brother…
Thanks in advance
i agree with modisana
Is that beat one of your own? I’d really love an audiotut on how to make such dynamic and revolving sounds.
great tutorial
thanks
My Blog
http://MotionSociety.com/blog
Seriously, this was really bad! You needed 21 minutes of my life to show me a simple wiggle connected to a slider?
Jeez. This was not good at all, no offence.
This could be done much quicker with Trapcode SoundKeys (if you need to isolate individual frequencies) or just by using plain old convert audio to keyframes. You can even tweak the audio with an effect or two, and then convert it to keyframes (in order to isolate certain sounds) then drop the effects. After that a simple expression using linear() based on those keyframes will pretty much do this for you for any song, without you having to have any rhythm or take any of your time.
Overall this is a pretty good tutorial to explain the concept, however.
Cool tutorial, I thought there would be some downloads for this, as mentioned in the tutorial – thanks.
Great Tut!
John can you help me? How do you Render/Export your composition because when I render it out as H.264 my Radial Ramp has “steps.” In other words it’s not smooth. Any help is greatly appreciated!
I’m doing this right now >:D
But, no project file?
what music is this???
really amazing music
Hey John!
Great video concept and execution! Great tuts to go along with it, too!
Could you please show how you made the “double lines” that sometimes go around and behind the triangles? Did you use trapcode stroke for that?
Also, could you pleeeeeeease show how you made that bright center of the “solar system” or whatever it was? I would love to see what went into making that, and THEN also seeing how you went about making it glow and over expose. Does this make sense?
Thanks so much!
patapon lol
….YOU ARE THE MAN…(speechless)
The final product is high quality level, but the tutorial doesn´t correspond or doesn´t live up to that quality level
Also,
I love how bassy and distorted and industrial the bass sounds in that song. Do you have any suggestions of other songs or artists who use a similar sound?
Would be great if you did a longer tutorial on some of those distortion effects and camera movements as they are fantastic.
Going to give this a go this weekend and add my own bit of jazz to the equation.
hi
please someone can help me with that expression. im getting disabied
shakeyCam = effect(*Slider Control*)(*Slider*);
wiggle(15,shakeyCam)
thanks
for some reason I tried putting the expression in but it keeps giving me an error ^o).
The expression im writing is
shakeyCam = effect(*Slider Control*)(*Slider*);
wiggle(15,shakeyCam)
what am i writing wrong?
Please help!
Ps. The Error Says
After Effects warning: Expected: )
Expression disabled.
Error occurred at line 1.