The Magic Bullet Cosmo plugin from Red Giant does a fantastic job of quickly covering up those unsightly laugh lines and crow’s feet on your talent. This plugin seeks out areas in your footage containing values found in skin and then gently blurs the area careful not to affect sharp details like eyes. Like Mojo, it’s a great way to get the job done quickly. Simon Walker takes you on a tour of this new tool.

Episode 47 of Red Giant TV features the workflow used to create the animated short Something Left, Something Taken. Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata, the team at Brooklyn-based Tiny Inventions, reveal how they photographed puppets and models and animated them in After Effects. The video shows how they made extensive use of several Red Giant plugins and also a lot of general After Effects tricks and tips.

And, here’s the short itself:

The Making of Something Left, Something Taken

The Tiny Inventions website has an extensive blog post which goes into a lot more detail about how the short was made. There are a lot more videos as well which go into a myriad of After Effects techniques. Of particular note, the video on the Max Rig shows how they were able to animate layers many precomp levels down right from the main comp using expressions and temporary rig controls. Amazing stuff!

- John Stanowski

You can also upload your own high quality video clips to Pond5 if you’d like to sell them as stock footage. I’m sure they have some sort of approval process in place, but you’ll have to read the fine print if you’re interested in participating.

Also, Pond5 is letting Toolfarm use some of their clips for plug-in samples on the site, so keep your eyes peeled (always wondered where that cliche came from!) I’m going to be doing an upcoming episode of Red Giant TV and I’ll be using a clip or two from Pond5 in the tutorial. Pretty cool, eh!

• View tutorial
• Download project files
• View sample of the effect
• Dowload a free demo of Trapcode Form
• Buy Trapcode Form