Forging the Ultimate Weapon

infamousproduction0
May 14, 2021
4 min read

After completing the glowing eyes effect, this immediately became clear to me that I had to do this next. Armed with the new ideas for masking, I researched a few video and eventually came across a guide by Will Carmack called, STAR WARS Lightsaber Tutorial | After Effects.

This was a simple and quick guide, but unbelievably effective at the same time. I was quite astounded at the effect, especially for the few steps it took to achieve.

Getting Started

Added everything to timeline, trimmed to where I would activate the Light Saber would shoot out and added a white solid layer that would act as the base for the blade when I added a mask to the new solid layer.

Added a mask to the Saber White layer, then activated the stop watch. I then went through the footage frame by frame adjusting the mask until I had a shape that emulated the blade. I tried to make it one smooth motion coming out to make sure it looked like the movies.

Going frame by frame adjusting the mask I am not going to lie was extremely time consuming, it then donned on me that it probably would have been easier to use a toy light saber that was able to flick out the coloured stick that resides inside, this way I could have drawn an more accurate mask to keep it level with the hilt of the blade.

After going frame by frame I then duplicated the white layer 4 times for a total of 5 layers, the video suggested to do this and I was a little surprised as to how this would work.

Pressing M key twice with all the layers highlighted dropped the mask settings for each Saber White layer, I then adjusted the feather for each layer to create the blur effect from the light saber with the above values.

The video suggested the black layer, so I added a new black background layer to act as a base for the blade to give it more depth as the video suggested.

Will, in the video then combined everything using pre compose, so I did the same. I understood now after my last post on the glowing eyes that any alterations that would be made to this layer from this point would effect them all equally.

I then changed the blending mode to screen as the tutorial suggested, to blend the back background in with the rest of the white layers that had been combined.

I added key frames for opacity to make the mask disappear cleanly, as during the watch back I noticed it had the same issues as the glowing eyes where some of the mask was visible at points where it didn't need to be.

As per the video, I then added a curve effect to play around with different colours and finally settled on this. I really enjoyed this part, it was like a Padawan building their first light saber. It could be any colour that I wanted and I finally settled on Purple, Samuel L Jackson had the right idea, it's a super cool colour for a saber.

I then added a new adjustment layer. dragging it under the combined saber layers and used colour correction to make the saber stand out a bit more.

I went into premiere pro after exporting the After Effects clipand added a few SFX that was available through a YouTube video as a free SFX pack ( will include at the bottom), and then placed them on the timeline and added some adjustments to the sound, including a fade in and out for the hum of the blade during the opening and closing to make it seem more real.

Wrapping Up

This was easily one of my favourite things to work on, the more I learn about visual effects the more I feel like a magician being able to pull something out of nothing really enhances even the most mundane of clips and bringing something like this from my childhood to life genuinely made me smile when I seen it work, I may or may not have been like Anakin in episode I; "IT'S WORKING, IT'S WORKING!" when I was doing this build.

That being said I knew I could have done better, so after the original video I made I went outside and reshot myself in a bigger environment as the builders had went away. The blade I had made was cool, but it was too Yoda sized for my liking.

I recorded new footage and then went in and redid everything and made sure that the light saber was a size that I was happy with instead of the Yoda sized laser blade making it more worthy of a Jedi knight, I chose not to show all the steps for the second one as I would be just repeating myself.

I have included the Version 1 and 2 below, thanks for reading!

VERSION 1

VERSION 2