Building Better Backgrounds Using what we learned creating the Nature and Liquid Abstracts collections to enhance background clips in your own projects. by Chris & Trish Meyer, Crish Design We are long-time users and occasionally, critics of stock footage, gravitating to background and nature clips. When you re on a budget or a deadline, there s nothing like high-quality, pre-built footage to be able to insert into your job, and fortunately there are many excellent collections to choose from. However, the euphoria of finding a cool clip can occasionally give way to frustration when you discover it clashes with or otherwise distracts from your foreground elements. After all, your client is paying you to push those foreground elements; in many cases, everything else is supposed to be the supporting cast. Therefore, it was both empowering and enlightening to design our own nature-based background libraries for Artbeats: Nature Abstracts and Liquid Abstracts. We want to share with you some tricks we learned along the way, and the design criteria we followed to improve the usability of our clips. Hopefully this will give you some ideas of how to better employ whatever clips you ve chosen for your own job. Figure 1b Figure 1c Figure 1a The design progression of a clip from Nature Abstracts: The original footage (a) is shot out of focus; the shape of the camera s iris causes the bright highlights to form hexagonal patterns. The shot is reframed and warped so that the fence frames the action safe area, and provides subtle bar for a lower third (b). The colors are then enhanced to provide a rich duotone (c). Finally, the center is darkened to add contrast where the title would normally appear (d). Figure 1d
Where s the Focus? One of our primary concerns is that the background does not distract from the text or images we re going to place on top of them. For example, it is usually desirable that the background be not as sharp as the foreground, to help the viewer quickly identify which are the elements they should pay the most attention to. Therefore, we personally lean towards softer backgrounds, or add a touch of blur to make the background sit back and not draw as much attention to itself. Figure 3a Figure 2a Figure 3b Figure 2b Although the sharp wind chime shot on the top is initially more visually interesting, it makes the text harder to read than the defocused background on the bottom. Clip on bottom is from Artbeats Nature Abstracts. When we shot our own footage for Nature and Liquid Abstracts (with some help from Jim Tierney of Digital Anarchy), we put the camera out of focus to take advantage of the artifacts of natural camera blur, such as geometric shapes around bright objects based on the shape of its iris. This is what makes camera blur look different than the standard Gaussian or Box blurs offered by most plug-ins. Different cameras sometimes have different iris shapes; the way the iris shape manifests itself can also change at different shutter speeds. We exploited these variations. Different cameras may exhibit different artifacts when pushed to extremes, such as diamond (a) or clipped circular shapes (b). Clips from Artbeats Liquid Abstracts. If you need to add just a touch of blur to an existing clip, or if it s pretty flat contrast-wise without tight specular highlights, a normal blur often suffices. But if you want something special, seek out special camera blur plug-ins, such as the wonderful new Lens Blur effect that has been added to Adobe After Effects 7.0. It allows you to pick how many blades the iris has, and to otherwise customize its shape and appearance including pumping up the specular highlights. In addition to being realistic, you can use effects like this creatively, such as setting the Iris Shape to Square (four blades) and optionally editing the Iris Angle to create diamond-shaped highlights.
Quiet Areas In addition to defocusing the entire clip, another concern is creating a quiet area where you intend to place text or images. It s okay to have exciting imagery spinning around the edges or perhaps acting as an underscore, but you don t really want too much activity going on right behind text you re trying to read. When working on our own clips, we made an effort to frame the shots so that a dark or light area without too much activity occurred in the middle or otherwise where we thought text might go. It was a bonus if we could create a nice underscore about where a lower third would be, or in the lower right corner to help frame a bug (station ID-style logo). Figure 4 ment with other modes such as Classic Color Burn and Dodge. Figure 5a Figure 5b An example from Liquid Abstracts where we created contrasting stripes around where lower third text would normally sit. It s possible to treat existing clips to help create these quiet areas. To darken the center of a clip to create more contrast for a title, create a solid of a contrasting color (such as black behind white text), and mask out the area where the title will go. It doesn t have to be a solid bar; you can increase the feather amount for the mask shape to give this area a softer edge, and reduce its opacity so that it provides just a subtle darkening. We also occasionally employ blending modes instead of normal opacity to create subtle interactions with the background clip. You would normally use Multiply on a dark solid to darken an area and Screen or Add on a bright clip to create a lighter area; for more intense color interactions, experi- Figure 5c
Ultra Water: They contain the organic movement of water, appearing sexy rather than distracting. Figure 5d You can make text more readable over almost any clip (a) by masking a contrasting solid behind the text (b). To make the effect more subtle, feather its edges and reduce its opacity (c). An alternate approach is to use this masked solid as an Adjustment Layer in After Effects, blurring the background just behind the text (d). Clip from Artbeats African Animals. If the problem is too much detail rather than too little contrast, you can exploit an under-used feature in Adobe After Effects borrowed from their sister program Photoshop: Adjustment Layers. Any effects applied to an clip or solid with the Adjustment Layer switch enabled are applied to the composite of all layers underneath. If the Adjustment Layer has an interesting alpha channel such as the blurred mask shape we just described for darkening an area then the effects are applied to only that portion of the image. In this case, applying a blur effect to the Adjustment Layer will blur only the masked area, allowing you to defocus the center of a clip and leave the edges sharp. If you need to slow down an existing clip, it s time to become acquainted with the Frame Blending feature that exists in most compositing packages and editing systems today. When you slow down footage with frame blending enabled, new inbetween frames are created by crossfading existing frames. Although it may be tempting to pick nice, round numbers such as 200% stretch (or 50% speed, if that s the way your program thinks), you run into the problem of potentially creating strobing in the final shot as you alternate between sharp original and soft crossfaded frames. We try to pick irrational numbers such as 311% so that every final frame is crossfaded to some degree. (The exception to this rule is stretching footage with 3:2 pulldown; in that case, you will want to use multiples of 80% or you may get some nasty strobing in the motion.) Frame Blending primarily uses adjacent frames to create new inbetween frames. There are other plug-ins out there which use as many frames as you like, creating more of a time smear effect. A great one to start with is CC Wide Time, which is included in the Cycore FX package bundled free with After Effects (for 16-bit processing, upgrade to Cycore FX HD: www.cycorefx.com). Nice & Slow Another aspect of a background that can be distracting is its speed. Of course, there are often times when you need clips that will help raise the energy and excitement level in a presentation, and there are many great hyperkinetic collections that can do that for you such as Virtual Insanity or Digital Edge. However, if interesting things are happening too fast in the background, again you might run the risk of distracting the viewer from studying the foreground. For slow background elements, we particularly love the water-based Artbeats collections that were shot with highspeed cameras, such as Liquid Ambience and Figure 6 Plug-ins such as Cycore Wide Time blend multiple frames together, which can create an interesting slurred or surging motion. Clip from Artbeats Liquid Abstracts. Frame Blending works well with softer imagery (such as clouds, or defocused nature shots), but
not as well with shots that have sharp edges. These edges can appear as ghosts or echoes in the crossfaded frames. In this case, you may need to use a time warping plug-in that creates new pixels for the inbetween frames by calculating where each pixel may have moved to from one frame to the next. We ve tried a few; we seem to get the best results the quickest with RE:Vision Effects Twixtor (www.revisionfx.com/ rstwixtor.htm). The last component in HSL is lightness, and this is where we have a lot of fun. We love clips that provide animated washes of color, such as the Artbeats Soft Edges, Digital Moods, and Dreamlight collections. We layer these clips on top of other footage using blending modes such as Overlay, Soft Light, and Hard Light to make it appear as if the underlying shot was lit in an interesting, animated way. Many of the Abstracts clips are intended to be used in this fashion as well. HSL: Hue, Saturation, and Lightness Now that you ve calmed down your background clips to properly fulfill their background roll, it s time to get their colors to match your client s, or to otherwise work with the theme you ve created. In December 2005 we wrote an Artbeats Tip N Trick named A Gentle Introduction to Creative Colorization; we used all of those tricks in our own Abstracts collections. In general, once you go beyond two or so colors in a background, you may start to have trouble matching it with foreground images or a client s color scheme. That s why we often colorized our Abstracts clips with gel plug-ins such as the Rosco collection in Digital Film Tools 55mm set (www.digitalfilmtools. com). After color or hue comes the saturation of a clip. Raw 3D renders or video captures can occasionally appear a bit flat and lifeless. A quick way to add punch to it is good ol instant sex trick: Duplicate a layer, set the top copy to a blending mode such as Overlay, Soft Light, or Hard Light, and blend opacity to taste. For more control, duplicate it again to create a third copy, and use a brightening mode such as Screen or Add, again blending to taste. To add puffy highlights that many romantically associate with film, add some blur to one or both moded copies. When we shot the Abstracts clips, we found the extreme focus and shutter setting we were using often resulted in washed-out images; judicious use of Instant Sex brought the color intensity right back. Figure 7a Figure 7b Even when the original shot is colorful (a), it often benefits from the instant sex technique plus additional color correction. Animated lighting and shadows can be added using the After Effects Fractal Noise plug-in (b). Clip from Artbeats Nature Abstracts. Although we made an effort to shoot footage that had interesting movement and shadowplay, sometimes the sun or wind did not cooperate. We enhanced some clips by adding animated lighting, using the After Effects Fractal Noise plug-in plus blending modes. In Fractal Noise, increase the Scale, and decrease the Complexity to create a broad, soft patterns. We then animate the Evolution parameter to make these patterns move. To make this pattern loop seamlessly, twirl open the Evolution Options section, enable Cycle Evolution, and match the Cycle parameter to how much you
are animating Evolution over the course of your clip. (Making everything loop seamlessly was another detail we sweated on every Abstracts clip, as does Artbeats with virtually all of their Backgrounds collections.) Zooming Out We had a lot of fun creating the Nature and Liquid Abstracts collections. It was an interesting challenge to take natural footage which many of us already associate with being both soothing and alluring and bend it into the normally synthetic world of stock footage backgrounds. We took everything we learned from using other backgrounds (and Artbeats has many wonderful collections) to hopefully make this one better for you to use. But we also hope that the tricks we learned above will help you with your own projects, whether you use our clips, other Artbeats collections, or footage you shot or created yourself. ### Chris and Trish Meyer are the founders and owners of Crish Design, an award-winning motion graphics studio that has created a wide variety of work for film, broadcast, corporate events, and special venues. They are one of the original development sites for After Effects, and have two books currently in print: Creating Motion Graphics and After Effects Apprentice.