Shot 1 is looking pretty cool but we still have a little bit more character to add to this.
Let's start by adding some bubble movement.
The Fractal Noise gives a very large sort of movement to the water.
But we want to add a little more subtle detail.
Ocean water has a lot of like plankton and all kinds of particular matter that
is moving through the water and a really nice bubble image would give us that
movement that we are looking for.
We happen to have one provided by iStockphoto.
We're going to go into the Audio-Video folder, and drag into the
composition. Twirl that closed.
Let's actually give ourselves a little bit more room to work here.
In the WATER FOOTAGE folder we are going to use the tiny_bubbles.
I am going to drag tiny_bubbles into my composition and place it right below the grain.
Actually, I'll place it below the Fractal Noise and above the RGB shot.
You can see tiny_bubbles is moving through the scene.
Let's double-click on that so we can see what that actually looks like and
tiny_bubbles is really just a sort of general watery movement.
You can see it has a beautiful flowing pattern to it that is really difficult to
duplicate with a Particle Emitter.
So we are going to use this to our advantage.
I think the worst part of this movie looks the best and so we can leave-- in Composition:
shot-001, let's move to the beginning here.
You can see that it's moving through the frame really nice.
Now, it's covering everything up.
So let's now change the blending mode for it.
I am going to change the blending mode to Overlay, and there it is.
You can see now it's sitting on top of the footage and interacting with that footage.
Now, it's a little too heavy.
So let's adjust the Opacity down.
I'll hit T on the keyboard to bring up the Opacity for that layer, and let's
bring this down to about 10%.
See how that looks. There we go.
You can see now when I scrub through the shot, there is just a general sense of
tiny movement sitting on top of the frame, and it really adds a lot of character
and personality to this water and makes it feel a lot more realistic.
Now, the next thing we like to do is draw a little bit of more attention to the
center of the frame and a technique I like to use is called a darkening layer.
The eye tends to wander around this frame, because there isn't really a
solid thing to look at.
We are going to be adding type to the very center of the frame and so I want
people to focus on the center of the frame.
So we'll add a solid layer with a soft edged mask that will kind of darken out
the outer edges of the image and draw our eye towards the center of the frame.
Let's go to the Layer menu, and do a new solid and this time we'll make the solid black.
Let's call it More Darker which I know isn't grammatically correct, but it
works for this purpose.
So I'll add that layer, and it's going to sit on top of everything.
So now it's completely covering everything up.
So let's add a mask to this.
I am going to hit G on the keyboard, which brings up my Pen tool, and I am going
to change it to RotoBezier mode.
That's going to allow me to draw a very smooth flowing mask on this layer.
Let's start drawing.
I am just going to loosely trace out a mask and you don't have to be real
precise with this because we can always go back and tweak it later on.
So I'll just close that one up right there.
You can see the RotoBezier makes very smooth flowing shapes and it's very easy
to create a sort of amoeba like outline here that will work well for our purpose.
Now, we don't want the black to be on the inside, we want the black to be on the outside.
So we are going to invert this mask.
So on the More Darker layer, I'll hit the letter M which brings up the Mask
properties, and I am going to check the Inverted box.
That's going to invert my mask.
Now, I can adjust the Feathering.
If I twirl the mask open and closed, I can see all the options for the mask and
the Feather options, if I scrub those to the right, let's bring those to about...
I don't know. 200 or so.
Maybe about 150 actually I think will work well.
You can see that edge got really soft.
Now, we can adjust the Opacity of the whole layer, and because I don't want the
outer edges to be completely black. I just want them to be a little bit darker
and to have it be a little more subtle so that our eye is just drawn to the
center of the frame without noticing that darkness on the side.
So if I hit the letter T on the keyboard to bring up the Opacity and let's
dial it down a bit. There we go.
About in the 30% range or so. Maybe a little bit darker, 40%.
Let's set the blending mode from Normal to Multiply which will help it interact
with the footage a little bit better. Excellent!
Now, when I scrub through, you can see--
Let's turn that off and on, so you can see the effect that it had.
That's without the More Darker layer, and that's with the More Darker layer.
You can see that it really helps to draw your eye towards the center of the
screen and that's really the whole purpose.
With the darkening and the character added to our frame now, we're ready to