Puppet Kaos - where Kelvin Kao plays with puppets and tell random stories

The effect that I’m going to talk about this time is the Sliding Curtain effect. (Actually, that’s what I call it. I don’t know what other people call it since I never really read about it somewhere else.) It was used in Episode 2: iBottle where Bottle Monster dragged Mac and Cheese’s video footage into focus as if it’s a sliding curtain, after saying “now, I disappear”. If you want to look at the effect, take a look at the episode and pay attention to time code 1:48 to 1:49 (if you are using the embedded video on the page, the countdown style time code would be from 1:52 to 1:51).

To refresh your memory, this is what it looked like:

As usual, I use Adobe Premiere Pro. If you use something else for editing, you can probably figure out ways that’s equivalent to what I did to achieve the same effect.

So how do we achive this effect? It’s actually very simple. It’s just one video footage sliding on top of another, except that it’s timed precisely so the sliding speed of the top video footage coincides with the speed of the dragging hand in the bottom video footage. In this case, Mac and Cheese’s footage is being dragged so it needs to be in the layer on top. Bottle Monster’s hand is doing the dragging so his footage should be at the bottom. Layers or video tracks in video editing is very important in this case, because what’s on top blocks your view of the layers below it, so you must know what goes on top and what goes below it.

Now select the Mac and Cheese clip and go to the Effect Controls window. You will see an item called “position”. Now click on the clock next to the word “position”. What this does is that you tell the program that you are going to be changing the position parameter as time progresses. This creates a little square thing in the timeline that indicates a keyframe. A keyframe is something indicating an important goal to reach (in this case, position of the clip) at a certain time. For the x value, enter -360. My footages are all 720×480 (yours might be different depending on how you captured the video) so setting x to -360 effectively moved Mac and Cheese’s footage to the left outside of the frame so it’s now invisible. All you see is the bottom layer in which Bottle Monster is ready to pull with his hand at the edge of the screen.

And now you create a bunch of different keyframes by changing the position number of Mac and Cheese’s footage. This number should be between -360 (video is entirely to the left hence invisible to the viewer) and 360 (video is centered, filling up the screen and making Bottle Monster’s footage invisible at the bottom). See all those squares? Each of them represent a new position. Choose the numbers carefully so it matches Bottle Monster’s hand.

And when you are done with all those steps, play it back to see what it looks like and adjust things. Yeah, I guess it’s a little hard to explain this with words. But as long as you are familiar with editing, just remember that you are moving the top video footage at the speed that matches the hand in the bottom video footage. That’s all you need to know to figure out the rest.

If you are not familiar with editing, I really recommend buying a book or watch a friend edit. Once you are familiar with the basics, you can pretty much just mess around with the software to figure out the more advanced stuff. This is the book I used and I think it’s pretty good for beginners: Adobe Premiere Pro: Complete Course. Until next time, happy editing.

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