3 Zach King Effects Explained

Hey what's up guys, welcome back. Today I'm going to be explaining three different Zack King effects and showing you how I recreated them. Zack King has been a huge inspiration of mine for years now, and every time I see a new effect of his, I swear I watch it on repeat for like 10 minutes straight trying to figure out how he did it. So I challenged myself to see if I could figure out how he does some of his effects, and this is my best attempt at creating three of my favorites and showing you guys how I think he did them. But, really quick before we jump into that, I would like to thank Nvidia Studio for sponsoring today's video. I recently started using the HP Envy 15 laptop which is part of the Nvidia Studio lineup and I have immediately seen a boost in performance while editing in Premiere Pro and After Effects. This entire video was edited using this laptop and I'll leave a link down in the description with more details. I'll also let you know a little bit more about Nvidia Studio a little later in this video. But alright, with that being said, let's jump into the first effect. So for this first effect, I shot one clip locked off on a tripod and broke it up into three different parts. The first part was created using a technique called force perspective. It's an optical illusion where you can make something look larger or smaller depending on the distance it is away from the camera. I positioned a toy trash can on a wooden platform close to the camera so it would look larger on screen. Then I moved myself further back away from the camera until the trash can looked like a realistic size in relation to me. After that, I acted out like I was throwing some trash away and simply dropped the bag onto the ground. I made sure to line up the bag perfectly so it looked like it was going directly into the middle of the trash can. Then I walked over and picked up the trash can off of the wooden platform. For the second part, I removed the platform from the shot and went over and picked up the bag of trash then dropped it straight back down into the same spot. And for the third part, I cleared everything from the frame to get a clean plate. In Premiere, I stacked the clean plate underneath the main part of the footage and masked out the wooden platform. I also made sure to animate this mask around my hand and to move with the trash can as I picked it up so you couldn't see the wooden platform or the bag on the ground. Then I took the shot of me dropping the bag without the trash can in it and created a mask around the bag. I trimmed this down to only a few frames and stacked it on top of my main footage, making sure it started at the point right after I let go of the trash bag. I adjusted the position, scale, and rotation so it would match perfectly with the trash bag from the main footage. Then I simply animated the mask on the bag as it fell to the ground, making it look like it disappeared into the trash can. I also duplicated my main footage and selected the layer right above the clean plate. I deleted the original mask on this layer and created a new mask on just the bottom part of the trash can. Then I added the drop shadow effect to this layer and checked the shadow only box. I also slightly repositioned this layer and adjusted the mask until it looked like the trash can was casting a shadow on the ground. Then I changed the mask feather to 47 and adjusted the opacity on the drop shadow effect until I got the look I wanted. And then the last thing I did was fade the opacity of the shadow layer down to zero as I picked up the trash can off of the ground. For this shot, I filmed two separate clips. The first one was of me holding a plate with the sandwich already on it and covered in sand. Then I picked up another handful of sand and poured that over the plate. I made sure to angle the camera to where it was looking down at me and that I tilted the plate slightly forward while holding it. I did this so that the sandwich wouldn't stick up over the sides of the plate and make things more difficult. Then I took a nice big bite out of that sandwich and had sand stuck on my teeth for like the next 24 hours. The second shot, I filmed an empty plate on the ground and made sure it was in the same lighting and that I positioned it at a similar angle as the plate I was holding. Then I also poured some sand into this plate. I should have poured the sand in this shot from the same angle that I poured the sand from my first one. This makes it easier to match up the streams of sand being poured between the two shots, but I think it still turned out okay. Next I brought both of those clips into After Effects. I selected the clip of me holding the plate and tracked it inside of Mocha. I tracked this clip up until I was done pouring the sand over the plate. Then back in After Effects, I applied that tracking information to a new null object. I'm going to have a video soon where I go into more detail about how to use Mocha for After Effects. It's a great tracking tool that I use all the time, and I believe Zach King uses it for his effects too. But okay, after I applied the tracking data to the null object, I came over to the layer of the empty plate and created a mask around the plate. I also increased the feather on this mask to 5. Next I took this and stacked it on top of the layer of me holding the plate. Then I parented this layer to the null object. After that, I rescaled and positioned the empty plate layer to where it perfectly covers up the bottom of the plate with the sandwich on it. I also had to adjust the mask to make it line up correctly. Then I timed up the layers so that the sand being poured onto each of the plates matches and happens at the same time. After I had those timed up, I keyframed the opacity of the empty plate layer to go to 0. I did this for the part where I was pouring the sand so that it's a smooth transition and makes it look like the sandwich is appearing on the plate. Next I went through and cleaned up the mask so that it was lined up properly throughout the shot and was hiding the sandwich the whole time. And then I just added the Curves effect to the empty plate layer and adjusted the highlights so that it matched the shading of the plate with the sandwich on it. And the very last thing I did was add some fake camera motion to the shot and that gave me my final effect. Really quick guys, before we get to the last effect, I want to let you know a little bit more about the HP Envy 15 and NVIDIA Studio. The HP Envy 15 is powered by an NVIDIA RTX 2060 graphics card, which offers a boost in performance while using Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. This takes the load off of the processor and utilizes the graphics card with GPU acceleration while using these programs. NVIDIA Studio is great for creators who are looking to get a boost in their creative process. For years while using Premiere, I've had to drop the playback resolution from full down to something like 1 quarter or even 1 eighth quality just to watch my footage play. I pretty much just got used to having to edit while looking at low quality footage. But with using an NVIDIA GPU, that is no longer an issue for me. Now I can drop 4K footage straight into Premiere and play it back at full quality with no hesitation or dropped frames. Another area where I've seen a boost in performance is with my color grading process. Without the GPU acceleration, any time I made color adjustments, I couldn't watch back what I had just changed. I had to render the clip out first every time I made any tweaks or changes to my clip, and this was very time consuming. But with NVIDIA's GPU acceleration, any color adjustments I make, I can immediately watch my footage back at full quality and no longer have to wait around for it to render the preview. My export times in both Premiere and After Effects have also seen an improvement. Here's how long it took to export a 47 minute long wedding video that I edited without GPU acceleration turned on. It took 1 hour and 15 minutes to fully finish exporting this video. Then with GPU acceleration turned on, it only took 21 minutes to complete the export of that same video. So it was a difference of 54 minutes and that one really impressed me. So as you just saw, having the proper tools to get the job done can make a huge difference. But alright guys, now let's get back to the final effect. Now this effect is the most involved and I can make a separate tutorial for this if you guys are interested in watching a more detailed explanation. Let me know down in the comments. But so for this effect, I shot one clip and broke it into two different parts. First I shot a clean plate of the room where I did my effect. Then I brought a bin into the shot and leaned a piece of foam board against it. After that, I acted out the scene where I dropped the boxes into the bin and then walked over and picked up the camera. Then I circled around the foam board to reveal the bin behind it. Next I brought that footage into After Effects and split the clip into the clean plate and the main footage. Then I split the main footage layer at the point right before I picked up the camera. I selected the part of me picking up the camera and tracked this inside of Mocha. Inside of Mocha, I tracked the four corners of the foam board, making sure I checked this box right here to track the perspective as well. After that was done tracking, I selected this button which brings up the surface of the tracking data and I lined these four points to the corners of the foam board. Then I was finished in Mocha and jumped back inside of After Effects. In After Effects, I selected the clean plate and trimmed off a few frames from the end of this layer. Then I turned that trimmed part into a freeze frame. This freeze frame is going to stick to the front of the foam board using the tracking data. Then I positioned the main footage layers on top of the clean plate and freeze frame and trimmed the clean plate to end at the beginning of the tracked footage layer. I also made sure the freeze frame started at the beginning of the tracked footage and that it was stacked on top of that layer. Then I extended the freeze frame to end at the point when you couldn't see the front of the foam board anymore. Next I selected the freeze frame and made a mask around the foam board. Then I added the CC power pin effect to this and adjusted the corners to line up with the corners of the foam board and checked the unstretched box. Doing this will fit the mask to the composition. Then I selected the main footage layer that I tracked and opened the tracking data tab from Mocha. I selected create tracking data and hit ok. Then I changed the export option to corner pin support motion blur and applied this data to the freeze frame layer. Now when I play this back, you can see that freeze frame is tracked perfectly to the front of the foam board. Then I created a mask on the main footage on the part where I'm dropping the boxes into the bin. I just made a mask around the side of the frame that I was on so I could get rid of the foam board from the shot. I made sure the bottom of this mask was close to the top of the foam board. That's going to be the point where the boxes start disappearing. And the last thing I did was come over to the freeze frame and turned on motion blur. This gives the freeze frame some realistic motion blur as I'm circling around it in the scene. Now I would like to point out that layer motion blur is a GPU accelerated effect inside of After Effects and directly benefits from NVIDIA's GPU acceleration. I use layer motion blur a lot for my effects so it's nice being able to apply that motion blur without my project slowing down on me. But okay, after I was done with all that, I was finished up and it gave me the final effect. Alright guys, that's it for today. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, go ahead and give a thumbs up and consider subscribing if you haven't already. I would greatly appreciate it. Remember to check out the links below for the HP Envy 15 and NVIDIA Studio if you're looking to speed up your editing workflow. Right now you get three months of Adobe Creative Cloud for free with the purchase of any NVIDIA Studio device. Which is a great deal because it gives you access to so many great Adobe programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects. Pretty much it sets you up with every tool that you need to start making creative content. So if you want to know more about all that, check out the description below. But alright guys, that's it. Take care and I'll see you soon.