In the industry of Visual Effects, there are a lot of roles and people involved in the process creation of a project. Today we are gonna talk about 3 basic and important roles that you can find involved in every single project created.
Runner
A runner used to be a position where you would work and learn on set all the skills necessary to become an artist in the industry.
This position has evolved over time and nowadays its a lot more different. You still learn and get on set experience but is more as an assistant, where you will work under the direction of more experienced staff doing a bit of everything. From answering the phone, look after guests to when necessary in some occasions work in the actual production.
Matchmover
A matchmover artist match CG scenes with shots from live-action footage. By tracking the camera movement and recreating plates the are able to make the scene appear from the same perspective. They also do body and object tracking, using markers to recreate the movements of people, vehicles and other objects in CG.
It’s bascically the bridge between 2D and 3D. This is a good example of what matchmovers do.
Roto Artist
Roto artist has a very hard and tedious job. They manually draw and cut out objects from a shot. This process is done in almost every frame of the shot. If a shot is 10 seconds long that’s 240 frames, and 240 frames that you have to manually edit to add or cut out something from the shot. They need to have a really good eye and a lot of patience in order to complete this difficult and repetitive work.
Good examples of rotoscoping:
Finally, I wanna leave here an amazing video where you can see a good example of the VFX in general. I saw this video for the first time in my first day of the master and it inspired me a lot.
See you in the next post.