Viral Instagram Effect: The Square Dance (Tutorial)

Published on June 12, 2020

Adobe After Effects Tutorials

after effects tutorial, cache bunny, instagram effect, squaredance, viral effect

How to create the insane square dance instagram effect

As you may know we are huge fans of Cache Bunny, a director and VFX artist who creates some amazing effects on her instagram page. And recently we saw her Square Dance video which went viral. We were amazed by how it looked and decided to replicate it as good as possible for this weeks Copy Cat Friday video.

The first step

We first had a look at a behind the scenes video that Cache Bunny shared, this gave us a lot of insight on how to achieve the effect and how to shoot it. One thing was certain, we had to time the camera movement and we had to do a lot of masking in post production. And of course we also needed a dancer!

Getting the shots

Shooting the video was quite easy, you first need a gimbal shot where your dancer (actor) does a movement that ends in a pose, hold the camera still and let the dancer walk out of frame, then shoot the gimbal shots of the background. While shooting this, make sure to have someone who counts so you know when the dancer did his pose and when the camera started moving again. And if you want to loop it’s also nice to know when the camera stops. If you find it hard to do it with counts you can play a music clip on the background and use that as a cue for your timing.

Once you’ve shot the gimbal shot place your camera on a tripod and let the dancer do his/her thing. Keep in mind that you also have to follow the exact timing or pacing of the music here.

Editing the Square Dance

Open up After Effects and use Mocha AE to track the dancers bodyparts and use that as a mask, which you can then use as a track matte. To be honest, we did have a couple of issues when using Mocha AE but we found a solution for that so in the end everything worked out.

Now of course we followed the example of Cache Bunny and made square mask but you can do this with whatever shape and size that you can imagine. If you have followed along with our tutorial you should be able to create this effect yourself, so get creative and try to make yours as unique as possible! And when you do, make sure to tag us whenever you post it on social media so we can have a look at it.