Week 6 Gun Blowback

In this lesson, we are supposed to pick one of the tutorial video we want to do. The video I picked is the 01- Gun Blowback. As usual, we first import the materials given into After Effect then we drag the video named - blowback.mov to the timeline and duplicate it (command+d). At 0:00:00:05, shorten the blowback1.mov to one fram-erate and use the pen tool and pen out the top of the gun then move the drew out gun backwards. Add in blurriness to it by click on Effect->Blur->Directional Blur and adjust the direction and blur length to it so as to make it more real and realistic. The reason why we move the drew out gun behind is we wanted it to look like as if it was fired out.

Duplicate another video - blowback2.mov. In blowback.mov, at 0:00:00:08, shorten the video to 1 frame-rate again and move it forwards to 0:00:00:05. Adjust the opacity to around 13% and use the pen tool again and draw the gun part which it will go missing when the video plays.

Then turn back the opacity to 100% and you will see the part where you drew out is gone. The purpose of doing it is to further make it look like the gun is being draw back!

We mask feather it to 0.5 pixels to soften it. We also add the mask feather to the blowback1.mov and now we are at the last part of the exercise! Just add in the muzzleflashes into the stage and arrange accordingly and we are done! 

This exercise is simple and manageable. It further shows me that masking plays a important role in our video! As a lot of the exercises we done, we make use of masking.