MA Compositing students have recently submitted their third assignment and projects. The brief was simple yet challenging: to create a photo-realistic surreal shot with seamless integration.
Mandy Ho Man Ng successfully achieved this master piece which involves another student, flying mid-air above Greenwich Park in London.
The quality of such work revolves around thorough preparation prior to filming as well as a flawless attention to every details during the compositing phase.
FILMING
The filming of this plate took place at Escape Studios in front of our own chormakey or green-screen. In order to capture a realistic motion, the performer was lying on a stool set upon a turn table. A portable leaf-blower provided the necessary wind effect, adding to a sense of weightlessness.
CLEANUP
Once the plate captured, the next step was to remove some elements overlapping the live action footage such as the column of the stool. This very technical process required to animate and distort certain areas of the coat.
INTEGRATION
The first step towards integration is in fact ‘Extraction’. The process by which the foreground plate is turned into a mask or alpha. This is typically performed in Nuke – the industry standard of compositing softwares – through a series of nodes interconnected with one another.
Lastly the extracted plate is integrated in the background. Notable key aspects of this final task involved precise match-grading, replication of interactive shadows on the ground and even masking out some branches in order to make the foreground plate fully embedded in the scene.
JOIN THE ELITE
If you’re interested to join the VFX elite at Escape Studios, have a look at our range of POSTGRADUATE courses.
THE ART OF VISUAL EFFECTS AT ESCAPE STUDIOS 