Post Production
Motion Graphics Compositing
No matter how great the renderings or the footage turned out, it won’t mean much if it's not all assembled and composited in a natural, compelling way. In other words, compositing is the last best hope of finishing your project to the high standards expected. So don't screw it up.
No matter how great the renderings or the footage turned out, it won’t mean much if it's not all assembled and composited in a natural, compelling way. In other words, compositing is the last best hope of finishing your project to the high standards expected. So don't screw it up.
Years ago, in order to complete a visual effect shot to enhance a movie's look/style, tools such as the Optical Printer were the domain of a select few wizards who could take bundles of special effects footage and combine them together into one seamless vision. With the rise of the digital compositing workstation, film was replaced by pixels, and a new breed of artist took over the meticulous process of combining all the special effect resources into the finished shot. Such dedicated hardware systems as the DFX Composium, Flame, Inferno evolved into software solutions that could be run on more diverse computers and operating systems. Now the VFX industry can call upon amazing toolsets, Nuke and After Effects, that are much more approachable and powerful than ever imagined.
We used Adobe's After Effects to perform our final visual effects composites. Once all the various VFX elements were rendered or recorded, all the files were imported and the assembly process commenced. First up was creating the aerial visuals of the Palisades Theatre using live drone footage and 3D CGI renderings from Cinema 4D. Next were various shots where we imagined flashbacks as old Super-8 or 16mm footage. These shots used the clean footage we captured on location, then applied all sorts of textures (dust, scratches, grain, light-bleed, etc.) to create an alternate reality from our protagonist's past. Finally, in order to bring our protagonist's hallucination to life, we combined the live action set footage with the CGI fires, creating a disturbing illusion of what he was seeing in his mind.
I'm quite partial to After Effects because I've been using it since its version 3.0 release in 1994 when Adobe acquired it from Aldus Corporation. Back then, it was quite limited in its capabilities (I remember seeing a demo back then when the inventors boasted about being able to render 10 seconds of a moving QuickTime image in only 3 hours! For shits and grins, check out this early v1 Demo 🤓). Eventually the application was enabled with the advanced capabilities of 3D layers that thrust it into the forefront of digital motion graphics design and VFX compositing. I even wrote a book about how to use version 6.5 back in...uh, 2004?! The Easy Guide to After Effects v6.5. Funny enough, much of what was written then can still be applied today.
