From the course: Creating a Short Film: 09 VFX Environments

Understanding compositing

From the course: Creating a Short Film: 09 VFX Environments

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Understanding compositing

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- [Narrator] In this chapter, we're going to look briefly at some core concepts in the world of visual effects. And we're going to start here with one of the oldest and most common visual effects techniques, that of compositing. Compositing is simply the process of combining multiple elements. Compositing was really explored by George Melies and his brother over 100 years ago. Melies would use miniatures, dissolves, double exposures, and other tricks to combine footage together. Now, when he started out it was almost kind of like magic tricks, showing what could be done, like I got this trick, and now I can do this trick. But later, Melies took those things further and began to integrate effects with storytelling, so it wasn't just about showing off a new camera trick. Still, as brilliant and innovative as Melies was, the composites didn't really mesh objects completely. He would expose one area of the film and then put one object there and then expose the rest of the film with another object, which combined things from multiple worlds in the same frame. But that still didn't allow those objects to interact completely. Then, later in 1940, a movie called The Thief of Baghdad premiered a new technology where an actor was shot in front of a large blue screen and then that blue screen was later optically removed. This allowed a character to seemingly interact with the background, such as to be placed in the hands of another character. And the effect holds up pretty well considering this is the first attempt at this new tech. This began a new era of compositing. This lead to Superman being able to fly around Metropolis and Luke and Leia being able to zip around the forest of Endor on speeder bikes. And these days, compositing is easier than it's ever been before. Many of the shots in The Assurance are just a bunch of elements composited together. For example, if we take apart one of the big shots from the finale sequence, we will see live-action footage of my daughter Natty in front of a portable green screen at a local park. We'll also see computer generated renders of cliffs separated in Photoshop so I could put fog in between the cliffs to simulate depth. And this fog is live-action footage as well. There's also this 3D render of Golhatin in here, as is computer renders of swirling particles and live-action footage of dust, which has been color-corrected to look like fiery embers. There's also multiple shots of actual cloud footage which has been masked and blended together to create the perfect shape in the sky. And there's countless effects like flares and blurs and color adjustments to tie everything together and make it feel like it all belongs in the same world. And that's another tip for compositing, anything that multiple layers have in common will help sell the composite. So it's common to add noise, blurs, color correction, anything that gives the objects more to have in common. So, in order to create your own composite, you basically need these three simple steps. Number one, plan out what you want happening in the shot. Number two, gather all of the necessary elements that you need, and number three, combine those elements in a way that makes them look like they all realistically belong together. Now, that last step, and actually all of these steps, are much easier said than done, and really, this is the art of compositing. But that's what we're going to be digging into in these visual effects courses. And remember that just like with the Melies brothers, it's less about your skills or the technology that you have at your disposal and more about your creativity and how you use what you have.

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