Give Your Video A Pencil Sketched Look
Tutorial Details
- Difficulty: Intermediate
- Requirements: Photoshop CS4, Trapcode Particular (optional), Filter Forge.
Download Source Files
I think we all used to create little cartoons in school by drawing on each page of your text books and flipping through them to animate. Well, lets all save a tree. In this tutorial we’ll be creating a similar looking animation in AE using Trapcode Particular’s Aux Particles. From there we’ll bring it over into Photoshop and learn a little bit about how to apply filters to video with the help of Filmstrip format.
Preview
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Tutorial
Step 1
Start by creating a new composition with your settings. I made it 1280*720, 5 seconds long at 25Fps and called it Main.
Import your logo and bring it inside the composition.
Step 2
Select the logo and precompose it. On Pre-compose dialog select "Leave all attributes in ‘Main’" so that the new composition would be the size of our logo. Call it Logo. Open it.
Step 3
Now we need to think ahead a bit. We know that if we apply any filter in Photoshop to our logo, it’ll look the same on all frames because the color data remains the same. So we need to make it change for each frame.
Apply Brightness & Contrast effect to the logo. Set Contrast to 60. For Brightness, apply this expression : wiggle(25,50) which means that we’re shifting Brightness randomly for each frame.
Save.
Step 4
As we preview, you can see it’s flickering really fast. For this particular effect we know it’s too rapid because the look we try to emulate usually involves around 15 frames per second. What can we do? We lower the frame rate down to 15 fps for this composition. You can do it by going in Composition Settings.
Save.
Step 5
Next, we’ll create that thing growing behind the logo. Go into Main composition and create a new solid. Call it Particular. Apply Particular to it.
We’ll use Aux System so we need only few particles to be emitted.
Under Emitter, change Particles/sec to 300. Now set a keyframe for them at frame 0. Then move forward to frame 1 and lower Particles/sec to 0.
Set Velocity to 300 for faster burst. Preview and see the result.
Save.
Step 6
Don’t change anything under Particle, go straight to Aux System. Change Emit to Continously. This will make trails of particles behind the initial ones.
To make them bigger and denser set Particles/sec to 30 and Size to 40. Change Life to 5 and Type to Cloudlet.
At last, open Color over Life pull-down and set it to White to Black gradient. Hit Flip to reverse the gradient.
Save.
Step 7
Go to Physics>Air>Turbulence Field and set Affect Position to 100.
Now we can precompose our Particular layer. Call the composition Streaks. Drag it under Logo layer.
Go into Streaks Composition Settings and set its Frame Rate to 15 as previous.
Save.
Step 8
Now the background itself. I’ll use a paper texture. Place your texture inside Main comp and call it BG. To give the texture more detail, apply Curves and crank up the contrast a bit. Then apply Brightness & Contrast effect and add wiggle(25,30) expression to Brightness.
Save.
Step 9
We need to create one last element. In the Project panel, duplicate Streaks comp and call it Streak edges. On Particular layer, apply Find Edges effect.
Make a new White solid and put it under Particular as background.
Save. You’re almost ready to start exporting for Photoshop.
Step 10
Now you can go into Main composition Settings and change its Frame Rate to 15 also.
You’ll have to render each element separately so that you have a lot more control on their look. Start with Logo. Go into its composition and do it from there.
For each element you’ll have to do two things – first, save a preview image by going to Composition>Save Frame As>File…
Second, render the whole animation as Filmstrip. You can do it by adding the animation to Render Queue and changing Output Module to Filmstrip by clicking on it.
Filmstrip is a format that saves the animation/video on a single image and also encodes their time data on it so you can later playback it on necessary software.
Hit Render. Do the same with Streaks, Streak edges, BG. To render BG separately, just solo it by enabling Solo switch.
Step 11
Now you need to download and install this application – http://www.filterforge.com
It lets you to create and use all sorts of filters applying them through Photoshop.
At this point you should have rendered the following files: 4 Filmstrip files and 4 PSD’s for each element.
Step 12
Open Logo_preview.psd through Photoshop.
Then, open Filter>Filter Forge>Filter Forge…
After application opens you can start browsing through presets. Go to Creative – Old Drawing .03. You can select one of the presets and then adjust their Settings.
See the screenshot for my settings.
Step 13
Hit Apply. Now you can open Logo Filmstrip file. When ready, click on Filter Forge under Filters. This will automatically use those settings you used on the preview image. It’ll now apply them on each filmstrip frame so the whole process is pretty time consuming.
Step 14
After filters are applied, save the new Filmstrip through Save As…
Repeat Step 11 and Step 12 with remaining elements changing filter settings on your own.
Step 15
Bring the new Filmstrips inside After Effects. Take logo and background strips and place them accordingly in Main composition. I renamed them Logo strip and BG strip.
Open Streaks composition and bring in Streak_strip_2.fml. Place it under Particular and set its TrkMat to Luma so it would cut down the background.
Next, bring in Streak_edges_strip_2.flm and make a Black Solid under it. Set the solid’s TrkMat to Luma inverted.
Save.
Step 16
Switch back to Main. Bring in Streaks comp (rename it to Streaks matte) and put it on top of Logo strip. Set Logo TrkMat to Alpha Matte.
Now select Streaks comp and offset it 1 second forward in timeline. When at 1 second mark, select Logo strip layer and duplicate it by pressing Ctrl + D. Then press Alt + [ to trim the front part.
Step 17
Do some color correction and you’re done.
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The outcome looks a bit like Andrew Kramer’s Blueprint tutorial?
It looks nice, I will take a look at it later though.
It looks nothing like, nor uses any of the same techniques as Andrew’s blueprint tutorial.
*head explodes
This tutorial doesn’t look like Andrew Kramer’s tutorial, nor does it follow any of the same techniques that Andrew used to create his effect. They are two completely separate tutorials.
I just realized when I looked up that I was basically repeating Aaron’s response, totally unintentionally. Were just both on the same wave length
Ooh, this looks like something I’ll actually use.
Really good.
I’d like to download a pdf of this tutorial…
Congrats!
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Want to pay some foreign friends! At the same time, and you can also learn some older AE and video production skills! !
Try PDFill when installed it is listed as a printer. Then “print” anything directly to a PDF file instead of the actual printer. You could archive all the text based tuts here in no time.
please, more video tuts
I;ve been looking for smth similar. Very nice ! Ofcourse we have to play around way more to make smth better than the outcome. But stil… Where do you see a similarity between this and Blueprint tut guys ? jeezz
This’s Great and very cool
Thanks for that. Good tut.
FilterForge wont show up in my photoshop filters….
me neither!
really looking forward to solve this problem :/
anyone here can help??
thx!
Hi
I had the same problem
first make sure photoshop is closed,
then locate your installed filter forge folder(in applications on your harddrive etc)
There is an icon called ‘InstallPlugins’ double click this, it will try and install it in photoshop, and fail, as it did mine, however this window allows you to see where the plug-ins need to be placed.
(probably photoshop>plugins>filters) Manually copy and paste the 2 .plugin files fromt the filter forge folder into this location and start up photoshop. It should now appear in the filter menu.
I however have the problem that ‘old drawing’ style does not seem to exsist…hmmm?
It didn’t show up for me either. Apparently, FilterForge doesn’t work on Photoshop 64bits… so you’ll need to run it under the 32bits version. And I think the Old Drawing filter isn’t included by default when you download FilterForge; you have to go on their website and download it manually. Here’s the link for the filter: http://www.filterforge.com/filters/4326.html
Anyway, very nice tutorial!
Can’t believe peeps are trying to compare this with one of Kramers… Just because some of his older ones were…
Great tut, keep it coming.
Been waiting to be able to do something like this ever since I saw A-Ha’s “Take On Me” as a kid…. brilliant!
Damn! There’s no filmstrip in CS4….. last time it was seen was CS3…. yet this is a CS4 tut?? Anyone got a workaround to this in CS4?
This is made with CS4 so it should be there.
You have to go to output module > custom > format > filmstrip
how do i open the filmstrip on cs4 photoshop?? because when i open it just show me one image and not all.
like simple stuff.
Excuse me, i wonder the step 11! How can i get the psd file? I really don’t know….thx
For each element you’ll have to do two things – first, save a preview image by going to Composition>Save Frame As>File…
I have a problem. When I export the filmstrip format and open it in photoshop, it doesn’t show up as the column as seen in the tut, but only a static image. What went wrong?
Well done but I’d like to skip photoshop and do all that from aftereffects if possible. Still great tutorial though!
why does it say “particular (optional)” under “requirements”?
how can i do this without trapcode particular?
VIDEO COPILOT ROCKS….!!!!!!!!!
Hello there!!
Need a help!
I use photoshop CS5 and AE CS4.
My photoshop doesn’t open the FLM file, whenever I try I get the message: Could not complete your request because it is not the right kind of the document.
As far as I know I followed all the steps to render the compositon.
Any toughts to why this might be happening?
Thank you.
Wow! Thank you! I continually wanted to write on my site something like that. Can I take a fragment of your post to my blog?
Hi! It seems that the filmstrip export module is no longer in CS5
How can I do? I’d really like to apply this effect to my composition.. please
Not sure if this post is still useful to you..
I had the same issue, just export as PNG Sequence, making sure you are adding the RGB + Alpha channel of course. Then I made an action script in photoshop to batch process them all through Filter Forge. Re-import them as a PNG Sequence. E-mail me if you need this more in detail.
But there is probably a much faster way somewhere out there..
Adobe discontinued the Filmstrip format in CS5. What I did was export an image sequence out of AE. Then in Photoshop I batch processed all the images with the File–>Automate command. Photoshop processes all the images individually instead of using one Filmstrip file. You can reimport them back into AE as video footage.
Hi,
I wonder how do you get to logo unfold (drawing on) in the beginning?
ImaCrea: I had the same cs5 filmsrtrip issue, and tried to copy the filmstrip plugin from the cs4 to the cs5 (in pc, to the “file formats “subfolder in plugins folder), and voilà!
Wait a min, wait a min. This looks great and all, but you’ve neglected to mention that Filter Forge has to be purchased to use this tutorial, a plugin that costs at a minimum $150. Awesome. I just need to find an additional $150 laying around so I can do this tutorial. Figures.
Filter Forge has 30-day trial period.
Also, the tutorial is not exclusive for Filter Forge – there are tons of free filter plug-ins which can be used instead.
If anyone can help me, I have CS5 AE and PS, but under Output module, I dont have the save file as filmstrip option.
Great Tutorial. Would love to make an animation based on that.