forcelightningtutorial

Force Lightning Tutorial

Hello, and welcome to my tutorial for force lightning. Due to my time on the TFN
Fanfilm boards, I have found that force lightning is probably the most asked effect, second
only to lightsabers. Therefore, I thought I would presue this effect, and see how close I
could get it to look like Count Dooku’s lightning in Episode II. After a week of
expermintation, I think I have come up with a pretty close approximation to it using
Adobe After Effects. This tutorial is not one of my tutorials that can be adapted to others.
You will need at least Adobe After Effects Production Bundle 4.1 or Adobe After Effects
Standard 5.5. So now that we have got that out of the way, here we go.

A Word on Live Action Shots and Interactive Lighting:
If you know in advance that you will be adding force lightning into a shot, here are a few
pointers on achieving maxiumum realism. If you can bring lighting to your shoot, try to
bring a blue strobe light that flickers at a very fast pace. Set it up next to your actor
directly in front so that light from the “force lightning” shines on the actors face and
hands. This, combinded with the CG force lightning, will look VERY realistic.

Now onto the meat of the tutorial...

Launch Adobe After Effects.

Import the footage of your actor performing the lightning shoot.

Place your footage into the composition.

Now, just like with Ryan’s lightsaber tutorial, you will need to create a new layer by going
to Layer>New>Solid. Make sure the layer is BLACK.

Now, go to Effect>Render>Lightning.

Instead of giving a long drawn out detail of the settings, here is a screen grab of my
settings....

The inner color should be set to white, and the outer glow color should be changed from
blue to black. You will also find that the speed settings can be set between 7-10,
depending on personal preference.

Now, you will need to get rid of your actor footage by removing it from the composition,
as we just used it for visual reference. This is because we will need to render the lightning
against a black background.

Now, duplicate this layer twice by going to Edit>Duplicate or by clicking Ctrl+D. Now,
open the lightning settings for both of these new layers, and change the Random Seed at
the bottom to any number, but don’t use the same number as the other two layers.

Notice that these bolts have no branching archs. Force lightning does have a few archs,
you you can add an extra layer and use MINIMAL archs. Don’t over do it.

Put the start points of these lightning bolts to originate from the actors fingers and the end
points to wherever you want them.

Now, you may be tempted to render this out and add a glow. Let’s not do that quite yet.
There are a couple of things that differ force lightning from real lightning. What we want
to do now, is creat a second composition and place our first lightning composition into
our second composition. To give the bolts the “texture” that force lightning has, go to
Effect>Distort>PS+Ripple... This will give our bolt an almost identical look to force
lightning. DON’T confuse PS+Ripple with the standard Ripple filter. PS+Ripple acts just
like the Photoshop ripple effect does.

Now, this looks quite good now. Render out this compostion as “lightning core” or
whatever you want.

Now, if you would like you can start with a fresh project, as we are finished with our
previous project. Import your footage that you just rendered out of the lighting archs
against a black background.

What we want to do now is create the special arches that come from the fingers. They are
different in the fact that they have no glow, and that they have a blue core instead of a
white core.

Make a new composition and place your lightning footage in it. Duplicate the lightning
footage so that you have two layers. Just like you do in Ryan’s lightsaber tutorial, we
need to create a mask of our lightning a few “inches” in front of our actors fingers. Draw
a square like the one pictured below on the SECOND (top) layer.

However, there is one more step that I add to make it really look good. I add lens flares.
Not like lens flares that you would use as a plug-in though. Bring in your original
lightning footage of just the white core against the black background. Blur it by going to
Effect>Blur and Sharpen>Fast Blur. Give it a bluriness of 5.0. Now comes the part that
will give us just the bright points of the image. Go to Effect>Adjust>Levels. You will see
the triangles on the historigram. Drag the black triangle on the histiogram toward the
white one. You will notice that the grey areas get pushed to black, while the white areas
are the same. Now start pulling the white triangle toward the black one. You settings
should look similar to the ones below:

This is what your lightning should look like.

Now all we have to do is create the flares. Go to Effects>Blur and Sharpen>Directional
Blur. Set the direction to 90 degrees and the Blur lenght to 200. This will take a while to
calculate, but when it does, you will see that you now have white streaks going
horizonally. Use Ryan’s color balance method to change these streaks to a blue color.

Screen these flares over your lightning, and now you effect is done.

If you have any questions about this tutorial, please ask me about them at the TFN
fanfilm boards. Thank you.

Just like in Ryan’s lightsaber tutorial, we need to adjust mask feather. So go down to the
time line and use the drop down arrows to get into the mask controls. Set mask feather to
around 50 pixels. Now, we need to copy and paste this mask to our first (bottom) layer.
You do this by highlighting “Mask 1” and holding Ctrl+C on a PC, or by holding the apple
key and pressing C on a Mac.

Go down to your first layer and paste this mask into the mask catagory of your timeline
layer. However, this mask will be set to “Add” make sure to set it to “Subtract” instead.
You will also need to MAKE SURE you set the feather to 50 pixels as well.

So what we end up with now, is that your bottom layer is your main bolt, and your top
layer is your finger archs.

Now, go back to your finger archs layer. We will now need to change their color to the
blue our lightning bolt will later be. Go to Effect>Adjust>Levels. You will notice that at
the top of the levels box you have an option that says, “Channel” and at present, it’s set
to RGB. We want to set this first to “Red.” At the bottom of the Red levels, you will see
an option that says “Red Output White” Set this to 0 instead of 255. Your archs should
now turn a blue-green color. Click the channel selector and go to Green this time. Set
Green Output White to 128. You should now have the proper color for your finger archs.

Now all that’s left to do, is add glow to the main bolt. Turn the visibility off on the finger
arches and then add a glow to the lightning bolts the same way you would do a lightsaber
glow. Then render out your bolt with a glow. Bring in the footage of the lightning with a
glow and then place the layer with your finger archs layer over it. Make a new
composition, and we are about to composite ever thing together. Place the footage of
your actor as the bottom layer. Then place your lightning layer over it and change the
transfer mode to “Add” instead of “Screen.” Now, copy and paste your finger archs layer
over that and also set it’s transfer mode to “Add” You now have a force lightning effect.
Render it out as a completed composite.