INSTANT DECORATE with VFX like Kevin Parry (After Effects Tutorial)

Published on November 19, 2021

After Effects Tutorials

Adobe After Effects, After Effects, Kevin Parry, Masking, masking tricks, Visual Effects

Good vFX Don’t have to be complicated

When you start going down the rabbit hole of VFX you quickly start to gravitate to making them more complex. Adding a ton of effects to create mind-blowing VFX. And while these are indeed cool we cant forget those really easy and simple VFX shots. Sometimes a simple mask is all you need to create stunning visuals and that’s exactly what we’ll be doing today.

A few days ago Kevin Parry uploaded a brand new holiday season video. Here you can see him asking his Alexa to decorate his house. With the help of some very well placed masks he was able to achieve a very impressive result.

Think before you shoot

When working on effects like these where there are a lot of moving parts it always best to sit down for a second and think. You need to have a good battleplan of how to shoot this. What’s the first thing you’ll do vs the last, will you shoot in separate layers or have everything together, where will all the shadows be, etc. You don’t want to mess up this part because reshooting things like this means starting from 0.

We for example took 40 minutes to record all our shots. And that’s only 1 take so we were very lucky everything went right! Sometimes you don’t even notice something went wrong until you are already editing and then you have to go back to shoot all over again. Making you lose even more time.

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.