Force motion blur for spinning head effect?

[electric_bill_patton]

Hoping someone has some ideas for how to do this. I'm making a music video with a horror movie theme. I shot footage over an actor as he's being "possessed" I'd like to animate his face to move quickly back and forth with a ton of motion blur as if his head is spinning but so fast you can't see the details just a frightening blur. Any ideas.

[Roei Tzoref]

try different effects under the "Time" category:

• CC Wide time: will give you that smeary ghostly feel.
• Echo: will give a different feel as if you duplicated the video and placed multiple copies of it offset in time and superimposed in a blend mode.
• Pixel motion blur: can give you extreme motion blur for video.

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

Depending on the action in the shot you may need to separate the actors head from the background. If I knew I wanted this kind of effect I would have shot a clean plate with the actor not lying on the pillow so I would have had something to fill in the hole behind the actor when the head was spinning.

If the actor is already thrashing around you might want to animate a soft edge mask around the actors head and then start experimenting with the effects that Roei suggested. You might even want to try some directional blur, radial blur, displacement mapping, or other distortion effects. The mask will allow you to limit the effect to just the actor's face using the compositing options available in AE. Maybe something like this:

I think the key to pulling this off is going to be some roto work. You at least have a couple of ideas to play with. If we could actually see the shot we might be able to give you some better suggestions.

[electric_bill_patton]

thanks for the replies. I have been experimenting with your suggestions and starting to work something very creepy out. We did shoot a clean plate. The actor did not thrash around so the challenge is creating the blur without the motion captured on camera. I'm digging the results of the turbulent displace combined with cc wide time. I think it's a matter of dialing in the numbers now.

[angie_taylor]

I also love the Echo effect for stuff like this, it creates a ghosting effect when set to higher values. If the actor was not moving you can add movement using a wiggle expression perhaps? Use the clean plate along with the Difference Matte effect to isolate the head. With the Pan Behind tool, move the anchor point of the head to where you would expect the head to rate from 9where it adjoins the neck). Make the layer 3D. Then add a wiggle expression to the X position, X, Y and Z rotation of the head. Using a high value for frequency and a low value for amplitude would work well. You may want to experiment with these. Then Precompose this layer, adding all attributes to the comp. Apply the echo effect to it and hopefully you’ll have something suitably creepy 🙂