Emanuele Serniotti, whose career began at Escape Studios as a student and then as a studio assistant, is now a veteran generalist in the London VFX industry.
“One of the core requirements for a generalist VFX artist is speed, whether for budget reasons or delivery deadlines: as VFX generalist, things get messy – in a good way. We’re the bridge between 3D and final shots, and Nuke is our go-to. Its node-based setup lets us handle just about anything that comes our way, which is vital when you’re jumping between tasks all day.
“Slap comp” is a daily thing. We take our 3D renders and drop them onto the backplate. Nuke lets us blend them seamlessly, then we use depth passes to fade things out realistically, like how objects lose sharpness in the distance. We’ll throw in some mist or fog too, using gradients and noise to make it feel natural.
We do a lot of Sky replacements. We project 2D sky images onto basic 3D geometry in Nuke, making it look like the sky’s really there. This projection trick is also key for shots that aren’t fully CG – we’ll project still frames of 3D renders onto geometry to add details or fix things without going back to 3D.
Nuke’s latlong projection capabilities are crucial for footage where the camera moves 360 degrees, or almost. For example, when we have to replace or create 360 environments that are visible throughout a sequence and seen from different angles in different shots.
It’s not all fancy comps, though. We also use Nuke for the more mundane stuff – fixing texture glitches, making sure renders look consistent. Matte painting is another area where Nuke shines. We project painted elements onto simple geometry, building environments without needing full 3D models.
Nuke’s where we throw everything together to create concept comps or mockups. We can quickly mash up renders, photos, and matte paintings, getting ideas down fast. This lets us make changes on the fly, saving us from endless back-and-forths with 3D software. Nuke’s flexibility is what makes it so important for us generalists. We can tackle a ton of different tasks and keep the production moving.”
THE ART OF VISUAL EFFECTS AT ESCAPE STUDIOS 