Buttercup Challenge from TikTok – Floating Body Parts (Adobe Tutorial)

Published on April 28, 2020

After Effects Tutorials, Premiere Pro Tutorials

After Effects, buttercup challenge, floating body parts, Masking, premiere pro, tiktok

Adobe Premiere Pro Masking

Masking is a technique where you use a pen or shape tool to create a specific shape on your footage which will then be cut out. It’s kind of the same principle as using scissors on a piece of paper.

Masking in Adobe Premiere Pro is possible with the use of the pen tool, this can be found in the opacity property of your clip. For this video, we mask around certain parts of our body so we can let them fly in until the point where they would appear.

Adobe After Effects VS Adobe Premiere Pro

While it’s possible to mask in Adobe Premiere Pro, it is better to do this in Adobe After Effects. There are multiple reasons why After Effects is better at masking. For instance, you can make multiple masks on the same clip and even place a mask inside an existing one to subtract a certain part of the mask. Another benefit of using After Effects is the fact that we can camera track our clip. This way we can place objects that we masked out in a 3D space, making it look like they are hovering or flying in real life and are therefor part of the scene.

TikTok as a playground for creators

While TikTok is mostly known as an application for youngsters and teens who want to dance to songs or sing themselves it is also a really good playground for creators. There are a whole bunch of VFX artists and video creators who make daily or weekly TikTok videos. Even Zach King is on TikTok! We also made a TikTok account a while back but haven’t been posting on it so maybe we should start doing that! Now, I recommend watching our tutorial and create your very own floating body parts video. If you do so, make sure to post in on social media (TikTok maybe?) and don’t forget to tag us, we would love to see your results.

Storyblocks Video

This video was sponsored by Storyblocks and although we often talk about Storyblocks, we highly recommend it. We use it daily in the office, not only because they have an insane amount of high quality 4K stock clips but also because of the big amount of super cool After Effects templates. They are all easily customizable which makes it really easy to use because you don’t have to put a lot of time and effort into creating your own logo reveal, intro or transition.