Compositing Reel - 2023
This reel highlights my compositing work as of Spring 2023, largely covering my past 4 1/2 years with Zoic, with a little personal project at the end. Everything showcased was composited in Nuke, and any roto I did myself utilized Silhouette. Please see a detailed shot list below.
For All Mankind - Season 3
Camera Projection - Around 0:17 of my reel is the original framing of the plate in this shot. Layout provided an augmented camera move that started very high. While the projection itself was straight-forward, the challenge in comp was blending the plate into the CG environment. This ended up being a mix of matte painting work and my own paint in Nuke. The astronauts’ shadows also needed extended, which I achieved by requesting a cast shadow pass from lighting, knowing we had digital doubles roughly tracked for their visors. This pass got me the natural motion and proper placement I was looking for, but I had to do some additional roto to properly blend them with the plate shadows.
Green screen - This was the initial lookdev shot for the visors, which I developed for each episode and distributed Nuke setups to the team. It also ended up being the most complex in terms of layering. We had various roto passes to hold out the helmet edges for the visors themselves. In addition I needed a multitude of roto layers for the stacked characters. Matching the plate ground to the CG ground was particularly challenging, requiring projection of careful paint work that was partially matte painting, and partially my own. Screen-left sees a mix of set rocks and Unreal Engine rocks, carefully matched in comp to hopefully result in a seamless transition ;)
Green Screen - Another hefty visor shot. As I had gotten started on visor and environment lookdev on so many of the opening shots of episode 6, these were ultimately left on my plate to final. This shot was a particularly challenging on the keying front. The green screen was very dark, with very hot highlights off the suits that bloomed against the screen. Comping onto very bright Mars skies resulted in many dark edges around suit details that couldn’t easily be dealt with. Lola Akinwusi assisted in that meticulous work on this shot, and many others. Another note-worthy aspect here are the foreground rocks, which were rendered out of V-Ray by our lighting team. The usual AOVs made matching them to the MG plate hill a much easier task than the Unreal backgrounds.
Green screen - This shot was selected for the teaser trailer, and thus had to be brought to a near final state much earlier than the rest of the episode. I attended client calls and worked closely with our comp supervisor and CG supervisor to balance the environment to the client’s requests. This involved mixing several variations of the environment out of Unreal Engine. We used depth passes to control atmospherics in comp. Lacking traditional AOV’s, we ultimately treated our environment renders as though they were plate photography, relying on projected garbage mattes, and various types of keying to isolate and adjust shadows and highlights as needed. The depth passes were a huge bonus that were employed liberally throughout the show.
Lucy in the Sky
Roto + CG Environment - This shot utilized an augmented camera, requiring Natalie and the divers to be stabilized and then re-projected. We also had to create a pocket of bubbles that the camera moved through in comp by strategically placing photographed elements on cards.
Roto + CG Environment - In these shots, Natalie and the divers were on wires against a grey screen, and then roto’d. The CG was treated heavily in comp to define the look, creating haze from the depth pass, dialing in caustics, pools of light, etc. Bubbles throughout the scene were a mix of FX and stock elements, carefully matched to each other.
Roto + CG Environment - There were several shots like this that I was tasked with handling, including figuring out the continuity of red vs green LEDs on the panel throughout the sequence. Several of these drill shots had the live action flipped and flopped, requiring me to flip letters on the drill, and in this case, actually reverse the rotation of the drill bit. Ensuring the practical hole lined up and integrated with the CG one was a key challenge across these close ups.
Split Comp - I originally delivered this shot for the trailer in late 2018. For the final film, I had to comp two takes together. While the water filling the helmet was practical, we had an alternate take where Natalie delivered a line without any water. I ended up taking her mouth from her nose to her chin, and carefully integrating it into the practical waterline. In addition to this, extra bubbles streaming in were added, and the NBL environment and visor reflection.
1923
Blue Screen - The exterior of these shots comprised of a skydome we built in Nuke, and CG water and ghost ship. On the comp side, our challenge was adding additional window grime to the glass. Projection techniques weren’t feasible as our window geo from layout had the tugboat’s animation within the scene applied. So if we used the original tracked camera, the windows would drift out of frame. There wasn’t time to work this discrepancy out with layout, so we opted to apply the grime textures to the geo using UVs, and making adjustments per shot to ensure the glass was properly covered, and the correct grime was on the correct windows. The team worked diligently together to ensure continuity between our shots.
In this shot, I also had to animate the hanging pieces to swing around, which involved painting them out, stabilizing, animating their swing motion using other shots for reference, and re-applying the tracking. A bit of a challenge but utilized tried and true techniques for each problem I encountered. It was a satisfying little fix to fit the shot into the rest of the sequence.
Blue Screen - Many of the same techniques from the previous shot. Luckily the gear was swinging for real in this one. As the ship passed by on the right, I created shadowing across the interior of the ship. I also used the overscan of the water to our advantage and animated it translating across frame to help sell our hero’s attempt to steer out of the way.
Full CG - Unfortunately our hero did not avoid a collision. This went through some significant comp work to adjust the color and lighting to match surrounding shots into our early dawn look. I was also tasked with creating a wet look to the ghost ship’s waterline. The splashing water was a number of render passes from Dynamics, which saw some broad color work in comp to adjust highlights and shadowed areas, as well as some extra diffusion to help create the feel of some finer mist.
Blue Screen / Set Extension - While I was comp supervisor on this episode (1.10), I did end up doing the lookdev of this sequence and final comp of this shot. The boat’s size and layout went through many revisions right up to the 11th hour, which left comp with very little time for this small sequence of 5 shots. On the Sunday night before our Monday night delivery, when I finally had the pieces for this shot, I set to work making very broad adjustments, grading down the dock with the people until the luminance felt right against the ship. I used this tunneling effect to justify a bright source at the end, diffusing the sky against the ship and buildings. This overall look proved to be exactly what the client was looking for the next morning, and I set the compers loose on the other shots with my guidelines. We were able to deliver the sequence that day, and mostly had small notes over the next few days to address.
One note-worthy challenge we had throughout the sequence was that the blue screen sat on a barge, which floated freely compared to the dock. When this was tracked by layout and applied to the ship, which was many times longer, the barge movements were amplified, resulting in the ends of the ship sliding against the background. I took it upon myself to retrack the end of the ship and the background in each shot, and lock the two together using SplineWarp pins, which saved the layout team from many headaches.
Mrs. Davis
Green Screen - The actress was on wires here, but she needed to be descending with the platform, which was accomplished by layout and anim. I had to bring in the animated geo which was used for her digital helmet, and match a card to its animation (using Nuke’s match axis tool). The environment was heavily treated in comp. I created various custom volume rays on cards to get a sense of depth. The hose and platform were also CG, which involved some simple Z-Slicing in Nuke to fit her inside of the latter.
Green Screen - The actress was on wires here, but we needed to add additional “floatiness,” which again was accomplished by anim and required me to project the plate onto a match animated card. The lights on the suit were practical, but I also created additional sources behind her for more realistic glows, as she would be illuminating things around her even when a light was obscured from the camera’s view.
Green Screen - Once more there was a subtle projection needed to adjust her motion throughout the shot. The whale coming out of the depths was achieved in comp using the depth pass. Two aspects were particularly challenging in this shot:
The volume rays coming from her neck were tricky to sort out. I ended up using the PObject pass from her helmet render to isolate mattes roughly where her practical LEDs were. I then matched the luminance to that of the real lights, and tracked volume ray sources from below.
The other puzzle was her helmet, as she had various plugs that sat inside and outside the helmet, a head rest that sat inside the glass, as well as some goop on the outside. All of this with a 180-degree turn created a challenging layering task in comp. Several pieces also needed shadowing added to properly integrate with her suit and what was going on in the scene.
The Right Stuff
Set Extension - This shot had a life-size stand-in for the Mercury-Redstone 3 rocket. The fins at the base were accurate, so I was able to keep those, while replacing everything above. The scaffolding was also CG and had to be integrated into the practical smoke. On the tail end of the shot, I referenced historical footage and photographs to match the spotlights and other qualities of how the rocket, scaffolding, and lights looked on the morning of the real launch.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4
Multi-Pass Comp - I took on the majority of this sequence, helping to define the look based on concept art. I also had to track some paint work on the background of most shots, as we had some collision issues with some of the guns, but it was too late in the schedule to change the assets. Since the scenes were fully 3D and I had cameras and depth information, I was able to lay down cards and turn these fixes around quickly.
Multi-Pass Comp - I rather enjoyed getting to sink my teeth into some character shots that were longer than the shots I did for the announcement trailer. I learned a lot more about eyes on this project, and got to use a setup built for Thanos, that we adapted for our show.
Legends of Tomorrow
I wanted this shot for my reel mostly because this guy was just so darn cute. But this shot was somewhat challenging with the layering of his tentacles around the guy’s fingers, particularly his tentacles that wrap around the thumb while his face leans on it. A non-holdout and holdout version were both mixed in as needed, and I believe some SplineWarping was involved to ensure proper contact in a few places. Various contact shadows on both the creature and the hand were dealt with in comp. Other than all that, I mean, just look at him :)
Lucy in the Sky
Camera Augmentation - The live action in this shot originally only pulled out to reveal the practical window and settle with it full frame. As it was never intended to be such a dramatic camera move, there were a lot of challenges transitioning into our augmented camera, which in the end required brute force 2D tracking and rebuilding portions of the actor’s torso, arms, and the background. The ISS and shuttle required a fair amount of multipass work as well.
For All Mankind - Season 2
Lookev - I lookdeved the glass cracking in this sequence and animated it. Some elements of the cracks came from lighting but others were stock elements I mixed in for more detail. The refraction used some randomized RGB mattes from lighting but also some of my own roto shapes.
The surrounding shots in the final sequence were also comped by me. Facing out, these windows were replaced with roto, as there was a translight on-set that didn’t work out for these shots in particular. The cosmonaut was comped in and matched to the CG lighting. The window explosion was a tricky thing to convey, as we figured the bullet would bring the glass in for maybe a frame before the loss of pressure sucked everything back out. The glass debris came from dynamics and I did many rounds of comp to get the right balance of blurring and grading against the moon surface.
We composited many shots of CG papers flying through the room and out the window. The flashing lights were practical, and we mixed an alt render of the papers where necessary in comp in order to match. There were some practical papers in various shots; I can’t quite recall which were real and which were added at this point.
More paper! I mostly included a few of these shots for pacing and context, as they fly by quick. One thing to note is that the scene outside the windows is a translight, but required some paint work to remove some pieces and adjust the brightness here and there. This became my speciality, and every shot in season 2 that shows these windows was touched by me. Interestingly, at the time, my Wacom tablet wouldn’t work over the remote connection, so I had to do all of the paint work with a mouse, a fact my VFX supervisor took with immense glee.
More paper and flashy matching! More paint outs on the translight. Glass crack treatment.
The interior of the room was plate here. The exterior walls and window frames are CG, with CG glass breaking and paper shredding. This went through many rounds of revisions to find the right balance of lighting, between the red interior light, paper translucency, how the glass cracks should be lit, and transitioning the paper into exterior sunlight.
Full CG - This was a fun shot to put together, as it brought me back to my days at Digital Domain doing full CG shots. I visually matched everything to the treatments being done on other exterior shots by another vendor. There were many layers of paper and other debris to be comped onto the ground, and the dust kicking up when the digital double hits the ground had some lighting challenges. The Dynamics holdouts on the guy didn’t work very well if I recall correctly, so I ended up creating my own shadowing on him by stenciling out the lighting passes and matching the black levels to the surrounding shadowed regolith.
Sisters’ Quarrel
This was a fun shot to put together from all aspects. My brother and I knew we wanted to do environment destruction in this duel, and the thought of chopping an entire tree down and doing it practically was at the forefront of ideas. I acquired a motorized slider and did some tests in my apartment, finding that it could repeat camera moves well enough for a little forced reconcile in Nuke.
The challenge on the day was getting our timing right. We had to shoot Cyrah cartwheeling out of the way before the tree got chopped. So there was some guess work and multiple takes with different timing for safety.
We then had to chop the tree, which couldn’t be precisely timed. “It’s gonna go when it’s gonna go,” my older brother, Eric (the lumberjack) told me. That became our main plate, and I slipped the timing of the girls’ takes to match it. This meant the actual alignment of the plates didn’t work at all.
I knew it’d be a giant roto task anyway, but I had to pin Cyrah’s take to the tree chop take so that the motion blurred areas around her would line up, and so the bits of ground she interacted with could be tracked in throughout.
The clean plate to remove Eric on screen right also needed SplineWarp help, as there was noticeable parallax happening on the trees. This of course was the whole point of combining multiple takes with a moving camera. I wanted to do something that made people in the FanFilm community do a second take and ask “wait, how did they do that?”
For a more extensive look at the work that was completed (with the help of Erik Fakharzadeh, Steve Ernst, and Jake Warr) on Sisters’ Quarrel, check out our full VFX breakdown!