#061 - How did they do that?
Every now and then I see something on YouTube that's actually quite inspiring.
At least from a creativity point of view.
Ben Ouaniche is an Israeli cinematographer, director and visual effects artist whose work on his YouTube channel, MacroRoom regularly goes viral.
My goal was to create a new kind of ‘jump cut illusion’ video, but instead of using the normal cut in action trick, I wanted to create seamless cuts in slow-motion without the help of a fast action to cover the magic.
This required some precise planning and a lot of tests to get everything to work together.
— Ben Ouaniche
His latest video, Playing with Time, already has 4.5 million views and has gotten a lot of people interested, me included, in how he did it.
As with all 'magic tricks' it's really not that hard once you know how, and if you use the two most important shortcuts on YouTube < and > for frame by frame playback, you can see a few giveaways, if you know where to look.
Using rotoscoping and Alpha Matte in After Effects, I managed to separate different shots and re-time them to create an illusion of a continues shot.
— Ben Ouaniche
In this article from PetaPixel Ben shares some insights into how he made the video - including a handy 'drawing on the screen to match things' trick - but without really giving the game away.