Muzzle Flashes effects (Losses – Playlist)

I wanted to get my editing knowledge up a bit as my example interview question works so well.

I will be using the advanced muzzle flashed as I want my project to look as realistic as possible.

Hears what I learned.

Drop your footage into After Effects and change the footage to 32bit and the workspace to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 and check to Linearize Working Space. This mimics what the real world does with light meaning if there’s no light its black and if there is light its white. The other settings simply allow more effects to be added and the sRGB IEC61966-2.1 setting makes colour correcting easier and look better. I learned this in a Photoshop tutorial a while back.

To add the muzzle flash you need quick a lot of different effects. go to the timeline where the gunshot starts. Then add a sold that’s a light orange and change the blending mode to colour dodge. Then with that solid selected and then mask around the character. If the character is near a wall you might want to mask part of the wall as well. Add the muzzle flash to the timeline, line it up to the solid and then move the flash and position it over the and of the gun (using the 3d setting make it a lot easier to achieve). Then if actual footage is blurred make the muzzle flash blurred to make the footage. You can also change the blending mode of the muzzle flash to add. This is to make the flash look like it is in the scene.

Adding smoke added a little bit more realism to the muzzle flash. Drop the smoke film into the project, change the blending mode to add or screen and then line it up to the gun. You can also change the opacity of the file to blend it in even more. However, if there is a camera shake you must track the shot and then add that info to the smoke effect. This is because the smoke will be on screen for a lot more frames than the muzzle flash so it will be noticeable if the smoke isn’t moving with the shot.

There are some additional effects that you can also add such as a flash, lens flare and a distortion of the environment. These effects are fairly simple to add and must only be on screen for as long as the muzzle flash is shown.

Some things I came up with: You can animate the gun so that the slider looks like it is moving. You do this by duplicating the layer, masking around the slider and tracking it. Once you have done this you can move the slider by using keyframe markers and moving the position to match the way a gun would look. Or you could just buy a bb gun that is a replica of a real gun and buy blank bullets. Blockbuster films use these however if you are on a low budget just edit them in instead.

(This video is if I need any more help creating wounds on characters. This is just an extra thing if I need any more help. I can also look at some of the other videos in this playlist if i need any more help when creating my imagination sequence.)

I now need to get back on track to and find out more about my target audience. So I much do some research on where i should publish my short film. There is no point in creating a short film if i don’t know where to post it in the first place. I am going to start off with Twitter and then work my way up from there.