Kylo Ren’s Lightsaber — Kento

Adobe After Effects

I created the video using ‘Adobe After Effects’. ‘Adobe After Effects’ is a video visual effects software.

To add the Kylo Ren’s Lightsaber visual effects I needed to carry out the following three steps.

1. Tracing
2. Colour
3. Rendering

Tracing — Firstly, I needed to trace the outline of my toy lightsaber using a pen tool. Tracing was one of the most difficult tasks. I mean … boring tasks as I needed to check the video frame one by one and trace the movement of the toy lightsaber.

A one second video data has 30 frames. The length of the lightsaber scene in my video is around 12 seconds - which meant I had to trace 12 x 30 = 360 frames!

You know? It’s so much more than that. As you can see Kylo Ren’s lightsaber has fire coming out from both the left and right side of the lightsaber.

I had to trace all of them. It was 90 times per one second.

12 x 90 = 1080 frames!!!!!

Colour — After tracing I added the colour of the lightsaber. That was a tricky part as Kylo Ren’s lightsaber is not a normal lightsaber. The colour is like fire and so I applied Gaussian Blur. The colour curve was the most difficult one. I adjusted the colour red, pink, blue, by curve. It’s quite difficult to explain. Below is the curve colour tool.

Rendering— After I have completed the above tasks, I still had to render. Rendering is the process of converting all of the video, effects and colour into a video file to generate into a movie.

iMovie

I also used a software called iMovie. iMovie is a video editing software sold by Apple. I used it to set my starting scene, ending scene and sounds.

I took a photo of myself to make it as a ending. I created the ending similar to what they do in Star Wars. I usually use the same starting and ending scenes to make people recognise that it’s me.

If you use iMovie, you can create as many movies or trailers that you want similarly for tittles.

I really love STAR WARS so my title looks similar to STAR WARS.