Adobe After Effects Basics – Camera Shake

One of the easiest ways to enhance the look of destruction effects like explosions and impacts is to add a little bit of camera shake. Even the smallest amount of camera shake will greatly intensify the power of the effect. It does so by conveying the impression that the explosion or collision was powerful enough to make the ground on which the camera stands shake.

Fortunately, it is very easy to add camera shake in Adobe After Effects and in this tutorial we will add some camera shake to the effect we created in my roof destruction effect tutorial. Here is the final sequence of a giant smashing through the roof.

Adding Camera Shake With Expressions & Expression Controls

To add camera shake to our footage we will make use of two great features in Adobe After Effects: Expressions and Expression Controls. Start out by revealing the Position property on the layer that you want to add camera shake to. ALT-click onto the stop watch icon to add an expression to the property. In the expression editor type

wiggle(10, 100)

If you scrub through your clip now, you will see that the clip jumps around by up to 100 pixels 10 times a second. This seems to make the entire scene shake rather intensely. Note that you will see black borders as your clip leaves the main area of the composition, but don’t worry about that for now. We will fix that up once we’ve got the camera shake under control.

The strength of the camera shake is controlled by the second parameter of the wiggle expression. We can lower the amount of shake by changing the expression to

wiggle(10, 10)

You will see that your clip now jumps around the screen a lot less, up to 10 pixels 10 times a second.

When adding camera shake to a destruction effect, you will likely want the camera to be stable at first, start shaking when the explosion or collision occurs and then slowly return to a stable shot. Unfortunately, because the strength of the camera shake is controlled by the second parameter of the wiggle expression, we can’t keyframe it. But we can use Expression Controls to get around this limitation.

Go into the Effects & Presets panel and search for the Slider Control effect.

Apply this effect to your layer. You will end up with a simple Slider Control effect on your layer that does absolutely nothing. But we can wire up the value of the slider to the second parameter of the wiggle expression - and therefore control the strength of the camera shake with the slider.

To do this, expand the Effects tab so that you can see the Slider property of the Slider Control in your layers window and then go into the expression editor to modify the wiggle expression. Type

wiggle(10,

and then, with the cursor at the end of your incomplete expression, drag the pick whip icon on the left side of the expression editor onto the Slider property of the Slider Control. Release your mouse to insert this value into your expression. Finish the expression off with a closing bracket and you should now have

wiggle(10, effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”))

This expression will cause the layer to shake 10 times a second by the amount specified by the slider value. And, since we can keyframe the Slider property, we can now keyframe and control the amount of camera shake for our effect.

I added a few keyframes to kick in with a fairly strong camera shake just as the giant smashes through the roof and then subside slowly back to 0.

Your composition will now have some camera shake that helps sell the roof destruction effect.

Finally, let’s deal with the ugly black borders that we can see as our footage moves around the render area.

How To Remove Black Borders In After Effects

The easiest way to get rid of the borders is to simply scale up the layer.

However, if you do not want to clip off parts of your footage, you can also remove the black borders with the Motion Tile effect. Search for the Motion Tile effect in your Effects & Presets panel and apply it to the layer with the camera shake.

Go to the effect settings and increase the Output Width and Output Height properties to 200. The Motion tile effect will output the layer with twice the width and height by simply repeating the footage to the left, right, top and bottom. But now we can see seams where the clip is repeating. To solve this problem simply tick the Mirror Edges property in the Motion Tile effect.

Instead of simply repeating the clip, Motion Tile will now mirror the footage before repeating it, seamlessly extending your clip. However, even that is not without problems as the mirrored edges of your footage can look a little strange depending on the contents of your video.

Have a look at how the front of the van looks weirdly duplicated like it was staring into a mirror.

However, since the camera shake effect is pretty short, you can usually get away with using edge mirroring for the motion tile effect.

Lastly, to make the camera shake seem more realistic, I like to enable motion blur for the shaking layer. You can enable motion blur for any layer by enabling the motion blur switch on the layer itself and enabling the switch for the overall composition.

Your camera shake effect now has a realistic motion blur applied.

Adding camera shake is very easy and it does add a lot of impact to your destruction effects. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and will put this cool technique to good use!