SOUL Leaving Body VFX inspired by THE WEEKND (After Effects Tutorial)

Keep it simple

Music videos don't always need elaborate set design or tons of VFX shot. The Weeknd proves this once again with his latest music video Sacrifice. The whole video takes place in 1 dark location but the use of lights makes it feel like we are always getting a new set.

Next to this they also made a clever choice of only using 2 effect throughout the whole video.

Trippy effect

Creating effects like these don't need to be perfect. You can mess around with different effects until you get that "trippy" feeling. What they did here is mainly using a lot of flashing overlays to get these random shaped colors going all over the screen. Next to this they also animated the face being distorted while fading in and out a stylized filter.

D Soul leaving body Effect

This effect is similar to the dementor's kiss from Harry Potter. Where they suck the soul from a persons body. But here they make the effect more prominent than in the Harry Potter movies. In this video we used After Effects and combined cc Smear, Directional blur, Displacement maps and Glows to achieve this effect.

Storyblocks

Big thank to Storyblocks for sponsoring this video! In their ever growing community driver library we can find millions of royalty free stock assets. They really help us to bring our Visual effects to life, without compromising on anything.

Storyblocks is very affordable and there’s a download plan for everyone.