Building Better Backgrounds

Using what we learned creating the Nature and Liquid Abstracts collections to enhance
background clips in your own projects.

by Chris & Trish Meyer

We are long-time users – and occasionally, critics

– of stock footage, gravitating to background and
nature clips. When you’re on a budget or a dead-
line, there’s nothing like high-quality, pre-built
footage to be able to insert into your job, and
fortunately there are many excellent collections
to choose from. However, the euphoria of finding
a cool clip can occasionally give way to frustration
when you discover it clashes with or otherwise
distracts from your foreground elements. After
all, your client is paying you to push those fore-
ground elements; in many cases, everything else
is supposed to be the supporting cast.

Therefore, it was both empowering and enlight-

Figure 1b
ening to design our own nature-based back-
ground libraries for Artbeats: Nature Abstracts
and Liquid Abstracts. We want to share with you
some tricks we learned along the way, and the
design criteria we followed to improve the usabil-
ity of our clips. Hopefully this will give you some
ideas of how to better employ whatever clips
you’ve chosen for your own job.

Figure 1c

Figure 1a

The design progression of a clip from Nature Ab-

stracts: The original footage (a) is shot out of fo-
cus; the shape of the camera’s iris causes the bright
highlights to form hexagonal patterns. The shot is
reframed and warped so that the fence frames the
action safe area, and provides subtle bar for a lower
third (b). The colors are then enhanced to provide a
rich duotone (c). Finally, the center is darkened to add Figure 1d
contrast where the title would normally appear (d).
Where’s the Focus?

One of our primary concerns is that the back-

ground does not distract from the text or images
we’re going to place on top of them. For example,
it is usually desirable that the background be not
as sharp as the foreground, to help the viewer
quickly identify which are the elements they
should pay the most attention to. Therefore, we
personally lean towards softer backgrounds, or
add a touch of blur to make the background “sit
back” and not draw as much attention to itself.

Figure 3a

Figure 2a

Figure 2b
Although the sharp wind chime shot on the top is
initially more visually interesting, it makes the text
harder to read than the defocused background on the
bottom. Clip on bottom is from Artbeats Nature Ab-
stracts.
When we shot our own footage for Nature and
Liquid Abstracts (with some help from Jim Tier-
ney of Digital Anarchy), we put the camera out of
focus to take advantage of the artifacts of natural
camera blur, such as geometric shapes around
bright objects based on the shape of its iris. This
is what makes “camera blur” look different than
the standard Gaussian or Box blurs offered by
most plug-ins. Different cameras sometimes have
different iris shapes; the way the iris shape mani-
fests itself can also change at different shutter
speeds. We exploited these variations.
Figure 3b
Different cameras may exhibit different artifacts when
pushed to extremes, such as diamond (a) or clipped
circular shapes (b). Clips from Artbeats Liquid Ab-
stracts.
If you need to add just a touch of blur to an
existing clip, or if it’s pretty flat contrast-wise
without tight specular highlights, a normal blur
often suffices. But if you want something special,
seek out special “camera blur” plug-ins, such
as the wonderful new Lens Blur effect that has
been added to Adobe After Effects 7.0. It allows
you to pick how many blades the iris has, and to
otherwise customize its shape and appearance
– including pumping up the specular highlights.
In addition to being realistic, you can use effects
like this creatively, such as setting the Iris Shape
to Square (four blades) and optionally editing the
Iris Angle to create diamond-shaped highlights.
Quiet Areas ment with other modes such as Classic Color
Burn and Dodge.
In addition to defocusing the entire clip, another
concern is creating a “quiet area” where you
intend to place text or images. It’s okay to have
exciting imagery spinning around the edges or
perhaps acting as an underscore, but you don’t
really want too much activity going on right be-
hind text you’re trying to read.

When working on our own clips, we made an

effort to frame the shots so that a dark or light
area without too much activity occurred in the
middle or otherwise where we thought text might
go. It was a bonus if we could create a nice un-
derscore about where a lower third would be, or
in the lower right corner to help frame a “bug”
(station ID-style logo).
Figure 5a

Figure 4 Figure 5b
An example from Liquid Abstracts where we created
contrasting stripes around where “lower third” text
would normally sit.

It’s possible to treat existing clips to help create

these quiet areas. To darken the center of a clip
to create more contrast for a title, create a solid
of a contrasting color (such as black behind white
text), and mask out the area where the title will
go. It doesn’t have to be a solid bar; you can in-
crease the feather amount for the mask shape to
give this area a softer edge, and reduce its opac-
ity so that it provides just a subtle darkening. We
also occasionally employ blending modes instead
of normal opacity to create subtle interactions
with the background clip. You would normally use Figure 5c
Multiply on a dark solid to darken an area and
Screen or Add on a bright clip to create a lighter
area; for more intense color interactions, experi-

Figure 5d
You can make text more readable over almost any clip
(a) by masking a contrasting solid behind the text (b).
To make the effect more subtle, feather its edges and
reduce its opacity (c). An alternate approach is to use
this masked solid as an Adjustment Layer in After Ef-
fects, blurring the background just behind the text (d).
Clip from Artbeats African Animals.
If the problem is too much detail rather than too
little contrast, you can exploit an under-used fea-
ture in Adobe After Effects borrowed from their
sister program Photoshop: Adjustment Layers.
Any effects applied to an clip or solid with the
Adjustment Layer switch enabled are applied to
the composite of all layers underneath. If the Ad-
justment Layer has an interesting alpha channel
– such as the blurred mask shape we just de-
scribed for darkening an area – then the effects
are applied to only that portion of the image. In
this case, applying a blur effect to the Adjust-
ment Layer will blur only the masked area, allow-
ing you to defocus the center of a clip and leave
the edges sharp.
Nice & Slow
Another aspect of a background that can be dis-
tracting is its speed. Of course, there are often
times when you need clips that will help raise the
energy and excitement level in a presentation,
and there are many great hyperkinetic collections
that can do that for you such as Virtual Insanity
or Digital Edge. However, if interesting things are
happening too fast in the background, again you
might run the risk of distracting the viewer from
studying the foreground. For slow background
elements, we particularly love the water-based
Artbeats collections that were shot with high-
speed cameras, such as Liquid Ambience and
Ultra Water: They contain the organic movement
of water, appearing sexy rather than distracting.
If you need to slow down an existing clip, it’s
time to become acquainted with the Frame
Blending feature that exists in most compositing
packages and editing systems today. When you
slow down footage with frame blending enabled,
new inbetween frames are created by crossfading
existing frames. Although it may be tempting to
pick nice, round numbers such as 200% stretch
(or 50% speed, if that’s the way your program
thinks), you run into the problem of potentially
creating strobing in the final shot as you alter-
nate between sharp original and soft crossfaded
frames. We try to pick “irrational” numbers such
as 311% so that every final frame is crossfaded
to some degree. (The exception to this rule is
stretching footage with 3:2 pulldown; in that
case, you will want to use multiples of 80% or
you may get some nasty strobing in the motion.)
Frame Blending primarily uses adjacent frames
to create new inbetween frames. There are other
plug-ins out there which use as many frames as
you like, creating more of a “time smear” effect.
A great one to start with is CC Wide Time, which
is included in the Cycore FX package bundled free
with After Effects (for 16-bit processing, upgrade
to Cycore FX HD: www.cycorefx.com).
Figure 6
Plug-ins such as Cycore Wide Time blend multiple
frames together, which can create an interesting
slurred or surging motion. Clip from Artbeats Liquid
Abstracts.
Frame Blending works well with softer imagery
(such as clouds, or defocused nature shots), but
not as well with shots that have sharp edges. esting, animated way. Many of the Abstracts clips
These edges can appear as ghosts or echoes in are intended to be used in this fashion as well.
the crossfaded frames. In this case, you may
need to use a “time warping” plug-in that creates
new pixels for the inbetween frames by calculat-
ing where each pixel may have moved to from
one frame to the next. We’ve tried a few; we
seem to get the best results the quickest with
RE:Vision Effects’ Twixtor (www.revisionfx.com/
rstwixtor.htm).

HSL: Hue, Saturation, and Lightness

Now that you’ve calmed down your background

clips to properly fulfill their background roll, it’s
time to get their colors to match your client’s, or
to otherwise work with the theme you’ve created.
In December 2005 we wrote an Artbeats Tip N
Trick named A Gentle Introduction to Creative Figure 7a
Colorization; we used all of those tricks in our
own Abstracts collections. In general, once you
go beyond two or so colors in a background, you
may start to have trouble matching it with fore-
ground images or a client’s color scheme. That’s
why we often colorized our Abstracts clips with
“gel” plug-ins such as the Rosco collection in Digi-
tal Film Tools’ 55mm set (www.digitalfilmtools.
com).

After color or hue comes the saturation of a clip.

Raw 3D renders or video captures can occasion-
ally appear a bit flat and lifeless. A quick way to
add punch to it is good ol’ “instant sex” trick:
Duplicate a layer, set the top copy to a blending
mode such as Overlay, Soft Light, or Hard Light,
and blend opacity to taste. For more control,
duplicate it again to create a third copy, and use
a brightening mode such as Screen or Add, again
blending to taste. To add puffy highlights that
many romantically associate with film, add some
blur to one or both moded copies. When we shot
the Abstracts clips, we found the extreme focus
and shutter setting we were using often resulted
in washed-out images; judicious use of Instant
Sex brought the color intensity right back.
The last component in HSL is lightness, and this
is where we have a lot of fun. We love clips that
provide animated washes of color, such as the
Artbeats Soft Edges, Digital Moods, and Dream-
light collections. We layer these clips on top of
other footage using blending modes such as
Overlay, Soft Light, and Hard Light to make it ap-
pear as if the underlying shot was lit in an inter-
Figure 7b
Even when the original shot is colorful (a), it often
benefits from the “instant sex” technique plus addi-
tional color correction. Animated lighting and shadows
can be added using the After Effects Fractal Noise
plug-in (b). Clip from Artbeats Nature Abstracts.
Although we made an effort to shoot footage
that had interesting movement and shadowplay,
sometimes the sun or wind did not cooperate. We
enhanced some clips by adding animated lighting,
using the After Effects Fractal Noise plug-in plus
blending modes. In Fractal Noise, increase the
Scale, and decrease the Complexity to create a
broad, soft patterns. We then animate the Evolu-
tion parameter to make these patterns move. To
make this pattern loop seamlessly, twirl open the
Evolution Options section, enable Cycle Evolution,
and match the Cycle parameter to how much you
are animating Evolution over the course of your
clip. (Making everything loop seamlessly was an-
other detail we sweated on every Abstracts clip,
as does Artbeats with virtually all of their Back-
grounds collections.)

Zooming Out

We had a lot of fun creating the Nature and Liq-

uid Abstracts collections. It was an interesting
challenge to take natural footage – which many
of us already associate with being both sooth-
ing and alluring – and bend it into the normally
synthetic world of stock footage backgrounds.
We took everything we learned from using other
backgrounds (and Artbeats has many wonderful
collections) to hopefully make this one better for
you to use. But we also hope that the tricks we
learned above will help you with your own proj-
ects, whether you use our clips, other Artbeats
collections, or footage you shot or created your-
self.

###

Chris and Trish Meyer are the founders and own-

ers of CyberMotion (www.cybmotion.com), an
award-winning motion graphics studio in Los
Angeles that has created a wide variety of work
for film, broadcast, corporate events, and special
venues. They were one of the original develop-
ment sites for After Effects, wrote the highly-ac-
claimed books Creating Motion Graphics and After
Effects in Production, and are long-time Artbeats
users.