Creating Lightsabers in Motion

Creating Lightsabers in Motion

By Conor O'Sullivan

Step 2: Completing the Effect

Ok, you should now be done rotoscoping and at this time you need to check the box so the white block is now visible. As you toggle through your frames, even watch it on loop mode to review your clip, you should see a white box over your saber throughout the clip

Now you will need to add more layers, at least this is how I organize it, and so you don't get lost in the tutorial, you should follow. Later as you develop your own methods of organizing and creating this effect, you will get so used to it you wont even need to think. But for now we will stck with a lot of layers. So, hit the add button as arrowed to above, not once, not twice, but thrice (three times.) You will now have four layers excluding the video clip. Ignore these for now, because right now you need to apply some filters to the original layer. Make sure all of these clips are aligned over time so they are exactly on top of eachother throughout.

Now, apply these two filters now so you wont have to apply them to each saber layer. Make sure you apply it to the entire layer. Once these are applied, copy the entire layer, and paste that layer once into every new empty layer. You may organize it better than I do, such as name the clips.

Now, to the bottom saber layer, select the whole layer. Click on the inspector tab at the top right of the screen and select filters. For the Gaussian Blur I used 43 as my amount. You may do whatever suits you, and you may use stills from Star Wars as a reference. It is all personal preference. Adjust the other layers as well. For the one above that, I used 19. In the one above that one, I used 4. In the final layer, the core of the saber, I used a Gaussian blur of 1.

The last step (though there can be more steps for tweaking) is adjusting the color balance. First, you need to understand colors if you want to get it on your first try. If you remember your colors from pre-school, you will get this down right away. For those of you who don't, you will have to toy with corrections. As you can tell, I made a purple lightsaber. So, since blue and red make purple, those are set high. If green is too low though, the saber look very odd, so nevery have "0" or even close to it unless you are shooting for a weird saber. Experiment with the color balance of each layer. But what I do is make the bottom layer the most vibrant, the next highest I made a bit less vibrant, and in purple's case, pink worked well. For the second to top I left it white to give it more of a shiny glowy look, and for the top you either leave it white, or add a tiny bit of color. In this case a very light red would do, but I left it white because it matched Mace Windu's saber. Again, use Star Wars pictures as color references for further guidelines.

You clip should no be done. If it is a duel you can add clash stock footage, found here (control click save link as/download linked file.) Simply import this file, place it wher needed, resize, control click it on the timeline and set the blend mode to "Add."

Good luck creating lightsabers and may the force be with you!

Please leave feedback, ask questions, make suggestions or corrections be e-mailing me at: admin@cpostudios.com and please leave comments on the tutorial on forum topic.

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