“Lens Whacking” To Get Light Blooms In Your Footage

“Lens Whacking” To Get Light Blooms In Your Footage

on Feb 29th 2012 with 21 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Requirements: A DSLR camera.
  • Difficulty: Intermediate
  • Run Time: 6:22 min

In this tutorial, you will learn the basics to Lens Whacking, a cool trick that can help give your videos a vintage, artistic feel by allowing excess light into the camera. You will learn how to hold the camera, how to best position your lens, and some extra tips for managing your shots. This technique is fairly simple to execute once you familiarize yourself with the basics, and will result in quite a unique, dream-like effect in your videos.

Tutorial

Download Tutorial .mov

File size: 257 MB

 
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Hi! My name is Christian Hubbard, I'm 19, and I've been involved with film ever since I got my first camera for my 18th birthday. I love keeping up with industry news and am a bit of a "gear head" when it comes to cameras. I am currently doing a video internship while in school and am excited to see what the film world can teach me! :)  

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  • Tyler

    Maybe if you had a girlfriend you wouldn’t spend so much time whacking your lens.

    • Crystal

      Burn

  • Christopher

    Great tutorial! :D

  • dj

    Interesting effect, even with only limited and quite specific applicability. Nice to see something that doesn’t take $$ as the answer and only practice and skill. A couple things though. Really, it was great to do a “shout out” to where the idea came from; but, one shouldn’t need to immediately click onto someone else’s site to get an understanding about what you were talking about. It was literally 3/4 the way through when I caught on that you weren’t advocating trying to “bend” a fully seated lens(!) Probably naive for me, but I’d never heard of this before and it just didn’t click. Beginning with the shot where you were performing the technique, for me, would have set the tut up better than a full graphic of the other web site.

    And, I hope you won’t be offended but… the bg music for the voice overs was quite overmodulated and very distracting even though the bg for the examples was fairly effective. It also just didn’t seem to fit – when you want us to take you seriously we shouldn’t be listing to music that makes us think of Goofey or Opey on Andy Griffith’s.

  • http://pierrepblais.com Pierre Blais

    as a cinematographer I have one correction to make here. simply that the openness of the aperture as nothing to do with the light leaking itself. The light that leaks in in this method, just like when light leak in a film camera (the original way of achieving this effect, on which this trick is based), it leaks directly onto the film/sensor and doesn’t even go through the iris of the lens. The reason it does look “better” is that your DoF gets more shallow and is thus more sensitive to the slightest distance variation like you say giving that extreme in focus/out focus effect, which goes well with the leaking effect for that vintage look. As a tip, one should always start by exposing your image properly, by setting your shutter at twice the frame rate and use the appropriate ISO and aperture combination to be properly exposed with the desired DoF. One you have done that, you can play around to get the look you want (overexpose,underexpose, extreme shutter speed effect, etc.). Just my two cent. good post though, you explain the technique well.

  • Ace

    Okay why do you guys film on a green screen and just leave it like that? Isn’t aetuts+ (and other tuts+ sites) supposed to support good design and aesthetic? Leaving a green background like that just looks really bad, and makes it look very unpolished and unprofessional.

  • http://www.creativedojo.net VinhSon Nguyen

    Great explanation and interesting little effect, thanks for the information! One thing I would’ve done was to maybe show more demonstration, you explained it well but there weren’t really that many demonstration shots. (Granted its pretty self explanatory haha).

  • andrak

    This is old news. Soon to become a sickeningly overused effect by wannabe filmmakers.

  • Dylan

    Not sure why this is called lens whacking. Its more commonly known as “freelensing” which, in my opinion, makes more sense. I agree with you andrak. Its going to get bastardized. Thankfully if you are shitty at this your video is just blurry and useless, so the newbs will give up eventually.

  • Patrick

    in other words lensbaby

  • Mel

    Isn’t greenscreen made to be keyed…?
    anyway i don’t understand why everyone is talking about that technique these days… it’s an obvious and really old trick…

  • http://www.youtube.com/iGraphic Shams

    Here is my Attempt at Lens Wacking
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTYrITHb3CY

  • James

    Wich song did you use ­@ the end? Good tutorial btw!

  • Andrew

    Good explanation but if you wanted us to see your video just link to it, no reason to put a full 2 1/2 minute example video on a tutorial.

  • Steve

    Awesome tutorial. I’ve always wanted to know how to do that.

    However, this could have been better as a written tutorial. If you’re going to bother making a video, then SHOW us each of the points, don’t just say them. Especially since there are many specific details to remember – having them written down would be far easier to refer to.

    Also, it was only about halfway through the video I understood the point – Lens whacking is holding your lens off the camera, not attached. Something that was never clearly stated, but should have been since the very beginning.

  • harold

    much better if added in post and the sensor stays clean, too

  • can

    Hi there great tuts thanx for sharing. And which song did you use at the beginning video??

  • http://www,youtube.com/97north Bradley

    I’m not sure I understand this tutorial. Why not film you scene…Then in post generate fractal noise over a solid of any color you like, mask an odd oval or star-ish shape drop the opacity and get the same, or similar effect without risking a dropped lens or camera?

    What am I missing?

  • http://www.zebravideo.ca corporate video torotno

    Wish i had a third arm. Some wierd results i got using Lee gels inside the camera body. My Rokinon lens is wayy to big to put the filter on, so i cut some Lee gels which is cheap -10 $ i square foot and cut a small pease to put between lense and the mirror

  • André Hugo

    I’de like to know the specs off your lenses. Great tutorial.

  • http://www.facebook.com/igor.dordevic1 Игор Ђорђевић