Create a “Day After Tomorrow” Inspired Instant Freeze Effect

Feb 25th in VFX by Ben Wotton

In honor of Oscar's week we have another movie VFX shot inspired tutorial. A frequently requested theme is the effect of something being frozen very quickly. This tutorial will explain how to achieve this effect as well as a cool camera lens frost over and crack.

Author: Ben Wotton

Ben Wotton has a keen interest in Visual Effects and spends much of his time doing tests and thinking up ideas for new ones. He has been accepted to study a Bachelor of Arts (Animation & Visual Effects) at Charles Sturt University, Australia.

Preview

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There are no 3rd party requirements for this tutorial, these are only optional:
Trapcode Particular (download the trial version here)
Videocopilot's 'Action Movie Essentials' (download here)

To start with, you will need a still image or footage of an expanse of water. My clip is bought from footage firm- http://www.footagefirm.com/footage/nantucket.htm

STEP 1

Drag your footage into the comp window to begin. These are my settings. I upsized my comp to 200% purely so it can be viewed in a bigger window on Youtube and Vimeo.

STEP 2

In my case the boats in the background are moving slightly, and this will ruin the effect later on. So;
Duplicate the footage and go to a frame roughly where you want your freeze to start. Then with the duplicate layer selected right click, Time-'Freeze Frame'
Draw a mask around the boats that are drifting; as you see I was careful to minimize the amount of glassy water selected, as it is more obviously moving.

STEP 3

Duplicate the footage again and freeze frame. This will be our 'frozen' layer. Create a mask and shape it and animate it how you want your water to freeze over.

STEP 4

Next comes the icy look. I used an image from http://www.cgtextures.com/
Go to Water-Foam and pick the 6th image. (Far right, second row)
Import it into your comp, make it a 3d layer and line it up with your footage so it looks like it is lying on the surface of the water.

My settings are as follows;
Scale 144%
Orientation 276, 0, 0

Also while in this view, mask out all objects such as boats, etc.

STEP 5

Now create a mask that is as close as possible to the one that you used on the second still layer and animate this in a similar fashion.

STEP 6

Change your transfer mode to overlay, and do a RAM preview to see how the two masks' motions match.

STEP 7

Now we will apply two effects to add to the realism of the ice. First apply roughen edges and copy the settings in the image below. This breaks up the mask and gives the effect of the ice forming in patches and fusing together. Also apply a curves adjustment to give it some contrast.

STEP 8

Even though we have overlaid the ice image, the reflections in the water are far too crisp for rough ice. So create an adjustment layer and orient it the same as the ice layer. Apply Fast Blur to it, select repeat edge pixels and set the amount to 10. Put this layer below the ice image and above the freeze footage. Copy the mask from the ice layer but be careful of your scaling, you may need to scale the adjustment layer to fill the space and you will have to create a new mask if this is the case.

STEP 9

To add a more dynamic feel, you can add some frosty air or mist that travels with the ice, as if the very air around it is freezing.
Add a new solid and apply Trapcode Particular to it. I made my emitter a box and scaled it so it is a long and thin line that extends across the entire edge of the icy layers. Set the direction to uniform. I then animated the position x, y & z to match the speed of the freeze. I also scaled the emitter size x as it went into the distance, so that it covers the entire horizon of water. My finishing value is 10000. Set the particles per second to 554. (This is only a guide; you can adjust this to your taste.)
Copy these particle attributes and adjust to your liking.

STEP 10

Lastly I added a fog element from Videocopilot's Action Movie Essentials to give the clip a more dynamic appearance. The clip is Pre-Matted so you don't need to do anything more than drop it in your timeline.

If you don't have Action Movie Essentials, you can create a fog element using Fractal Noise.
Add a black solid and apply effect>noise and grain> fractal noise. These are my settings which you can copy and adjust to your taste

Set the solid's transfer mode to screen and the scale to 167%.
Animate the Evolution over the length of your clip. My amount was 3 revolutions over 13 seconds.

STEP 11

Now on to the second part of this effect- the frosting camera lens.
This is what it looks like on a black BG

Here is how you do it.
Firstly, grab your Foam element and drag it into the comp. Set the scale to 52%
Double click the elliptical mask tool to create an oval. Keep it on add and click the inverted box. Go to mask expansion and animate it from 824 to -70 over the time you wish the lens to frost over. Set the feather to 661 pixels.

STEP 12

Apply the effects CC Vector Blur and a Curves adjustment. Set the blur type to perpendicular, the amount to 169, and the property to lightness. Create a curve in the RGB that brings out strong contrast. This is how it should now look;

STEP 13

Now for the cracking lens. Take your crack.psd layer and bring it in to the comp. set the scale to 85%.
Apply a Curves adjustment and grab the two corners and slide the top to the bottom and visa- versa. This will invert the layer, making it white.

STEP 14

Now double click on the layer and using the erase tool, remove all excess parts of the image, such as the small dots, and the wider areas of the crack.
This is how mine looks

STEP 15

PreCompose the layer and move all attributes.
Now Create a new adjustment layer and call it 'Crack'.
Apply the effect CC Glass. Set the bump map to your Crack PreComp and the property to alpha.
Set the softness to 0, the height to 6 and the displacement to 100. Lastly turn the light direction to 65 degrees.
Apply a Fast Blur and set the amount to 0.2 to reduce the harshness.

STEP 16

Create a new adjustment layer and call it 'lens blur.' Apply the effect Lens Blur (bet you didn't see that one coming?)
Now go to the point in the timeline where you want the crack to happen. Select both adjustment layers and press alt-[
This cuts your layers so they appear at that point. Animate the iris radius on the lens blur from 0 to 15 over ten frames. Now go back to the first keyframe and alt-double click on your Crack Map PreComp. Apply Fast Blur and animate it over the same time, but starting at 9.2 and ending at 0. This should now give the effect of the camera focusing on the crack.

STEP 17

Now select all of your layers and PreCompose them, move all attributes. Now you should only have one layer. Create a new null object and apply Andrew Kramer's Aftershake_null preset. Found here; http://www.videocopilot.net/presets/after_shake/
Go to the frame right before your crack appears and set Speed, Amount and Rotation to 0. Click the stopwatch on all 3 and move forward one frame. Set them to 33, 75, and 35 respectively. Move forward 2 frames, set a keyframe for all three, move forward one frame and set them all to 0 again.

STEP 18

Now select your footage and parent it to the null, apply Motion Tile and select mirror edges. Set the width and height to a number enough to cover all black areas. If at the end of your 'shake' the footage is not squared, you can animate the position before (at 0, 0) and after (to whatever looks right).

That is how I created my freeze effect. Remember that the values and techniques are only guidelines to assist you in creating this effect and I urge you to alter them to create unique effects of your own.

Ben Wotton.