Modern blockbusters often use a subtle colouring effect to warm up actors’ skin tones while backgrounds and shadows get or remain cooler. The difficult part is doing this while keeping your star actor in focus. Magic Bullet Mojo enables you to tap into this modern Hollywood look in seconds, with easy customisable controls to suit any footage.Magic Bullet Mojo provides a simple way to make your footage look like an action movie, works together with primary colour correction tools like Magic Bullet Colorista, and is more simple and cheaper than Magic Bullet Looks. The tools and controls have been designed by director Stu Maschwitz for his work, so Mojo should get good results. I tried Mojo on a full range of short video clips and images, and yes, it works well if you want to focus on someone’s skin, or give a scene a specific atmosphere.
Magic Bullet Mojo works in Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Avid systems with a few common action film pre-sets for all hosts. I tested the After Effects plug-in. First observation: the plug-in may have been tuned to deliver fast render times on any system—no GPU required—on my old Power Mac I had to be patient.
I started by trying to focus attention to a face in a scene where a person’s skin colour came close to a wooden cabinet. That proved to be a challenge to Mojo, until I discovered the “Skin Solo” slider. At first, the colour effects affected not only the skin, but also the wood when I dragged the sliders to change colour and tone warmth. However, dragging the Skin solo slider all the way to the right minimised the changes outside the person’s face to a few details—very impressive!
The Skin Solo slider effect was also visible through the “Skin Range Visualizer”, a button that draws a grid over colours identified as skin tones. I could see the grid grow and shrink as I dragged the slider. However, as soon as I changed skin colours, the Skin Solo setting seemed to be lost and my complete scene was affected.
Except for changing skin colour, you can also “squeeze” skin colours. Squeeze here means that skin colours become more even, flatter.
Recalling emotions and a “feel”The Mojo setting by itself (all other sliders set to zero or balanced 50%, as appropriate) allows you to increase the green channel. The Mojo Tint slider then increase or decreases red, so that you get a sort of “old” look. The Mojo Balance increases or decreases the blue channel. The three sliders together offer you a complete colour atmosphere building system.
However, there also is a Warmth slider, which seems to control the level of orange in the footage. A Punch It slider adds contrast and a Bleach It slider decreases saturation.
The complete Mojo system lets you create anything from scenes that seem to recall feelings of “past memories”, to scenes that recall feelings of dirt or crime, and anything else you care to recall with your audience.
Magic Bullet Mojo therefore isn’t unique, but it’s true that it makes creating these effects incredibly easy, and probably fast on a decent machine too. I do know one thing: you can experiment endlessly with this plug-in, creating effects that are very subtle (there’s also a slider that lets you blend the effect with the original, for example) to effects that shout about the atmosphere you want to create.
The Magic Bullet Mojo plug-in costs less than 80 Euros.
