ANTONI COLL

We are gonna identify and discuss some of the techniques, genres and formats that have been used in several films. I have not seen a lot of these movies but we are gonna discuss a few clips we have from the presentation.

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1986)

A musical, comedy and terror movie, where they have used a mix of techniques. We can see in some shots that there are actual VFX components where it was probably difficult to achieve the same effect with practical work. But there are other shots where we can see clearly that are practical effects, most of them where the character interacts with the effect that’s implemented in the shot. We can see an example of this in the next images:

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The left image is an example of VFX where the right one is practical.

AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981)

American werewolf in London is a terror film with comedy touches and use a lot of practical effects, most of them are makeup. You can achieve an amazing effect when done well. This is an amazing example of SFX.

GREMLINS (1986)

A comedy/horror/fantasy movie is captured in digital where all they use is practical effects with the gremlins and others sets. Digital captured makes it easier to implement practical effects to the shots. We can see an example of this here:

THE ABYSS (1989)

The abyss is done with VFX, they have a wide variety of VFX techniques and well implemented to the shot. It’s a science-fiction movie recorded in digital. This helps with the VFXtechniques in the film.

INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)

This movie implements really well practical effects like miniatures with the live shot. They also VFX implemented and mixed with the practical one.

BLADE RUNNRE 2049 (2017)

Blade Runner is an action movie, captured in digital. This helps to implement all the effects, both practical and visual, being VFX and SFX in every shot there is no other way of recording this. In the video embed before you can see either both types of effects.

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Today we are gonna look at a few more experienced roles in the industry. This usually would be the entry-level to a company as a junior and then you obviously can progress and become senior, lead… etc.

CONCEPT ARTIST

A concept artist is in charge of the creation and design of any asset, characters, environment and any related product that needs to be designed. Basically, everything that you see in a final production one of the first steps that have been done is usually the concept artist generating ideas and designs, so the team can decide which direction to follow.

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MATTE PAINTER-ARTIST

This artist create painted representations of landscapes, sets, and other locations as backgrounds for scenes. This is done because it can be impossible to find a location like the one that you need or very difficult to record using digital or traditional techniques.

PREP/PAINT ARTIST

This role is dedicated to cleaning up backgrounds of live action-footage, preparing it for the effects to be layered onto it by the compositor. There are a lot of processes used to do this, they remove dust, scratches, sort out dropped frames, basically, anything unwanted is removed by prep artist.

COMPOSITING ARTIST 2D/3D

As I said on the previous role we talked, the prep artist removes anything unwanted from the shot, and the compositors are all the contrary. They have the job of adding and layering various elements in the shot. They work with other VFX departments to solve problems to release a photo-realistic final shot.

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.