God of War Effects Breakdown [Lots of GIFs] (Patreon)

For this month’s Insider newsletter I wanted to talk about some of the effects that I used in my most recent video - about God of War’s Leviathan Axe.

It was quite an editing intensive video, for lots of reasons, and so I decided to share some of the techniques I used. 

I made the video in Adobe Premiere, with a bit of help from After Effects. But hopefully the basic ideas will be applicable to other programs. 

Masking Kratos

A mask - which is when video footage has a hole, to reveal the images and footage behind it - can be used to make some nice subtle effects. So here, Kratos stands in front of the words “The Leviathan Axe”.

I use After Effects’s Roto Brush Tool for this. You simply paint over the section of the video you want to cut out, and then it will try and follow that section, frame by frame. It’s a bit fiddly and requires lots of touch ups, so I wouldn’t recommend it outside of simple jobs, unless you have a lot of time on your hands. 

Once Kratos has been cut out, I can just put him on a layer above the original video and the text.

Title Cards

I knew I wanted to make some title cards for the four major sections of the video (combat, general purpose, impact, and design). I decided to make them into a book on a wooden background. Then, to transition into the video footage, the book could fly away and the wooden slats could peel back to reveal the video.

The book is some free stock photo of a book cover. I used the Inner Shadow and Bevel & Emboss effects in Photoshop to make the God of War logo look embedded in the cover. And I got the font from the official God of War website. It’s really easy to turn web fonts into usable desktop fonts.

For the transition, I wanted it to look like a 3D book flying off the screen, but didn’t want to actually model a book for this video.

Instead, it’s just three layers: a back cover, some page spines, and a front cover. 

They’re all the same size and all do the exact same effect: they change position to fly off screen, they rotate ever so slightly, and they swivel - via the Basic 3D effect. I then used the Transform effect on the pages and the back cover to offset them over time, so they slide out from behind the front cover and create the illusion of depth.

The panels are literally just four pictures that move off the screen. If you repeat the exact same movement effect on multiple images, and then offset the images themselves on the timeline by, say, 10 frames each, you can make a nice staggered effect.

Frame by Frame

Frame by frame analysis is cool, but it can look a bit odd if you don’t present it right. It can look a bit like your internet is crap and the video is buffering. So I put it in a frame, had a subtle dust video continue to play at normal speed in the background, and clearly showed that we would be going frame by frame by using a visual indicator.

The pause effect comes from using Offset to move the image down a few pixels, a wave warp that wobbles the image like a dodgy tape, and some scanlines which are made with the grid effect. I also overlay some VHS glitch effects off of YouTube, a pause image, and that famous tape CLUNK sound effect.

Quoting Websites

I created this standard way of presenting website quotes earlier this year, and you might have seen it in the video for Celeste’s Assist Mode. So I use the Basic 3D effect to make the website screenshot sorta swoop up from the bottom, and a basic Wipe to have the background appear beneath. 

The website quote is hidden behind the screenshot, and appears as both the quote and screenshot move to the left and right sides of the screen. Then, when the screenshot slides across the screen, the quote is just deleted as soon as it goes out of view. I borrowed the panel transition from earlier to get back to the video clips.

Audio Visualiser

This is a surprisingly simple thing to do, as long as you’ve got Adobe After Effects.

Just put your video on one layer, and the “Audio Waveform” effect on another layer. Then use your video layer as the audio source. It will immediately create a cool effect where lines grow bigger in time to the voice or music. You can tweak the crap out of it, so make sure you futz with the frequency dials to ensure that you’re only capturing the frequencies that actually flair up during the audio.