Editing Magic: Pants Run Away (After Effects Tutorial)

Published on October 8, 2021

After Effects Tutorials

After Effects, Editing Magic, kidcurlylife, vfx magic

Editing Magic

Editing magic is a term that gets used a lot on social media. It refers to performing some kind of magic trick but with the help of some VFX work. Probably the most know person for these kind of tricks is Zach King. But there are of course soo many other artists. Like Curlykidlife for example! He has been making these type of videos for a while and found quite the success!

Running Pants

One of his latest videos is where he tries to iron his pants. But when he turns around to grab the iron, the pants gets up and starts running away. Besides the well executed transition between the empty pants and alive one, the best part lies in the details. Its easy to mask everything away to create the illusion of a walking pants, but having the other side of the pants visible is a whole different story.

Usually this takes a lot of frame by frame animation for the position, rotation and perspective. However we found a great way to create this as easy and as fast as possible.

In our video we show how we used 2 different pants. On that you wear when running around and one cut up so the back is visible. By holding this back piece while performing the movement you should already get an almost perfect image of the back pants. There ofcourse will be some minor adjustments.

Storyblocks

Big thanks to Storyblocks for their support. If you ever need stock footage for your video head over to them! Next to the 4K stock clips, they also have After Effects templates, Premiere Pro presets, overlay effects and so much more. Download unlimited video assets for a single price per year.