Behind the scenes: Using blending modes to present text in Beef History

A quick look at how we use After Effects to incorporate text into our videos.

Hello everyone. It’s Jiazhen, back with another “Behind The Scenes” special. Today I’m going to divulge another trick we use to make some of your favorite videos on our channel. Last time, we got a request asking for us to explain how we isolate and incorporate text from newspaper clips into our videos.

To illustrate how to easily we can use After Effects to incorporate text into background photos, I’m going to show you how to re-create the frame below:

First off, we create a parallax composition of the Vince Carter picture. To see how you can create the parallax effects, please check out my previous post. Then, what you want to do is to slide in the newspaper assets between the cutout layer of Vince and the background original picture. This will allow you to create an effect where you can read the newspaper clips behind the highlighted figure, while also filling out the spaces in the background picture.

But, as you can see below, the newspaper looks nothing like what we want in our video. So how can we tweak it to something more like what we need?

After Effects’ blending modes give you a lot of different ways to play with your assets. In this case I would set the blending mode of the newspaper’s layer to screen, which is essentially inverting the blend color and the base color and multiplying them. This would usually result in a lighter picture.

In this case, the black texts in the newspaper are projected onto the background while the white paper portions become partially transparent. After this, we go to the “Effect and Presets” tab and drag the “Tint” effect onto the newspaper layer to reverse the black and white. This cancels out the white paper portions of the newspaper and turn the black text into white, contrasting nicely against the darker background. This (roughly) is what it looks like.

Ok. Not quite what you have in mind huh? The combination we just used might have been enough for some very clean newspapers. But in this case the newspaper is quite dated and the digital version is not as clean as we would like. So now we can use a “Linear Color Key” effect on it. Use the eyedropper tool and click on the gray-ish color on the newspaper background to set it as the “Key Color”.

This effect basically uses the color information of the layer to create transparency from a selected key color. Here, by selecting the gray-ish background color, we are getting rid of it and creating a cleaner, more transparent newspaper layer in between the parallax.

Adjust the key color slightly to best achieve transparency and then position and mask out the sections of the newspaper you need, throw on a highlight for whatever sections you want, and then you will have something like this.

Of course, instead of the “Linear Color Key” tool, there are other options to achieve the same result such as using “Curves” or “Levels”. There are always different ways to achieve similarly ideal outcomes so if you have time, I would strongly encourage you to just play with the effects and sometimes magic happens!

Here’s another way we used blending mode to highlight text in our Vince Carter episode:

Against a lighter background, it makes sense to set the text to a darker color. This time, after I brought in the newspaper clips and masked out the useful portions, I set the blending mode on the layer to “Multiply,” which multiplies the blend color by the base color. In this case, we’d expect that to render the picture darker with the black newspaper text being left out against our lighter series background. Adjust the position and apply gradual motion to the selected highlight text and you can achieve the effect shown in the screenshot above.

This is a very common way of presenting text in Beef History, as it seamlessly blends the texts into our show identities/background. It also allows us a lot of versatility in terms of matching the text assets with other kinds of assets, freeing us from restraints of the newspaper’s structure. I hope this answers your question, DocMallard, and I strongly encourage you to experiment with different kinds of blending modes as there are so much more they can do with texts, pictures and textures. See you next time!