Portland, OR – February 13, 2020 – Red Giant has just released the first Cheap Tricks episode of the year, featuring “Sonic the Hedgehog” – out in theaters this Friday, February 14th – and his supersonic speeds. In the latest episode now out on YouTube, Dan “Hashi” Hashimoto, the Action Movie Dad, takes viewers through the paces of adding lightning-fast speed to their characters. Viewers will learn about 3D, compositing, color correction, and how to create cool looking VFX – like crackling electricity, particle-based dust, glowing light streaks and much more.
WATCH NOW: Cheap Tricks Episode 13 – Sonic the Hedgehog
“There are some awesome key things that I think really help sell the speed of a character. There’s smearing of the character, graphic trails, bonus elements like glows and electricity, environmental effects like dust getting kicked up and displacement ripples,” Hashi explains. “Usually you film someone doing a regular action and then speed it up in post, but there are a few things that you can do to make your fast forwarded performance look just a little bit better.”
Hashi demonstrates exactly how to make those graphics look better with different techniques and approaches to adding speed, like using opacity to blend frames together, or alternatively, using optical flow to generate new unique frames – thus creating motion trails that give the effect of super human speed. Employing the Red Giant toolset, Hashi uses Trapcode Particular for creating effects like dust trails and sonic booms, emulating the effects that are seen in real life with fast moving objects.
The full set of tools used includes:
- Red Giant Universe: Red Giant’s collection of GPU-accelerated video effects and transitions plugins for motion graphics artists and editors, Universe boasts over 80 tools supported across eight host-applications.
- Magic Bullet Looks: Magic Bullet Looks is designed to give filmmakers powerful looks and color correction, with over 200 fully-customizable Look presets and over 40 tools to customize or build new Looks. Get the best, most-intuitive color correction experience in the industry.
- Magic Bullet Colorista IV: Magic Bullet Colorista IV provides professional color correction for filmmakers, turning Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects into a high-speed professional color grading environment.
- Trapcode Particular: Create organic 3D particle effects, complex motion graphics elements and more After Effects. Now with Fluid Dynamics.
- VFX Supercomp: Supercomp is a compositing environment that makes it easy to create complex, seamless composites. In Supercomp, light and atmospheric effects interact with all layers and elements of a scene in a far more natural way, and with far less pre-composing in After Effects than ever before.
- VFX Optical Glow: A blazing fast, drop-dead gorgeous, photo-realistic glow effect for After Effects and Premiere Pro, Optical Glow makes adding picture-perfect glow effects to projects incredibly simple.
- VFX Chromatic Displacement: Chromatic Displacement uses one layer to displace the pixels of another, while smoothly separating out the colors, ideal for designing heat ripples like those created from supersonic speeds.
- Maxon Cinema 4D: Cinema 4D is an Academy Sci-Tech award-winning professional 3D modeling, animation, and rendering software solution. Its powerful and flexible toolset makes 3D workflows more accessible for design professionals.
Download the project files for “Sonic the Hedgehog” on the Red Giant tutorial page.
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About Red Giant
Red Giant is a software company made up of talented artists and technologists who collaborate to create unique tools for filmmakers, editors, VFX artists, and motion designers. Our company culture is focused on finding balance between work and life – we call it “the double bottom line” – this philosophy helps us ignore complexity in favor of building simple tools that yield giant results. Over the last decade, our products (like Magic Bullet, Trapcode, Universe and PluralEyes) have become the standard in film and broadcast post-production. With over 250,000 users, it’s nearly impossible to watch 20 minutes of TV without seeing our software in use. From our experiences as artists and filmmakers, we aspire to not only provide tools for artists, but inspiration as well. Watch our films, learn from over 200 free tutorials, or try our software at www.redgiant.com.
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Alex Molina
Hardworking, smart and upbeat can easily describe Alex. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Alex has been working in the communications industry since a very young age, giving him a wide range of experiences from broadcast to public relations. In 2012, Alex moved to Boston to take his education and career to the next level.
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Alex has a B.A. in Advertising and Marketing from the University of Sacred Heart in Puerto Rico and a M.A. in Integrated Marketing Communications from Emerson College.