Adobe After Effects CS3 Lightsaber Tutorial

Rotoscoping is a process by which special effects are postworked into video. These special effects are made to follow some object that is moving in the video. An example is the lightsaber, where is appears that the actor is sword fighting with a glowing energy blade, when in fact he has nothing but a small prop hilt in his hand. This process long and laborious, and there are several aspects to it. For the purposes of this article, Adobe After Effects CS3 will be used, but principles will be the same regardless of the program you use.

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  1. An important part of the rotoscoping process is shooting your scene. You will need to give your actors light sabers props they can swing around as they pretend to sword fight. When you create the effect later, the glowing blade will appear to extend from this prop.

    2. Preparing After Effects

  2. Before you begin in After Effects CS3, you will want to go to Creative Cow and download the free plug-in they have for creating this effect. While you can do the rotoscoping without it, it will make the whole process much quicker and easier. You will want to copy this file to the Adobe After Effects “Presets” folder. Now open After Effects CS3. Go to “File” and import the video of your actors sword fight scene.

    3. Rotoscoping

  3. You will start adding the rotoscoped light saber effect. Now in the menu select “Layer,” then “New” and “Solid.” So that you can keep track of parts, name the layer “LS Effect.” On the right, you will see the “Effects and Presets” panel. This is where you will find all your premade effects. Go to the “Animation Presets.” Under this folder in the “Andrew Kramer,” “VFX” sub-folder you will see “light_saber.” Right-click on it and place it in the video.

    You will see that the effect has two parts. You should drag the part that says “Start” to the end of the hilt in the actor’s hand. You should then drag the other part to the point where you want the effect to end (the tip of the light saber).

    Use your mouse to scrub the “Slider” in the timeline at the bottom to the next frame in the sequence. Reposition each end of the effect to match the new position of the actor’s hands. Now just keep doing this for every frame in the sequence.