Odd Socks was my second external project while studying at Escape. I was part of a student team working under Klaudjia Cermak, our tutor and VFX supervisor on this project. I was given responsibility for two shots in the project.

The main task for the shots was clean up. Removing unwanted reference markers or puppeteers that appeared in the shots. For my shots in particular I would have to remove the puppeteers and and poles used to control the sock puppets. This was a difficult task with the main actors being behind the clean-up I would have to do a lot of rebuild to realistically being back the actors with the correct motion to match the original footage. Fortunately I had clean plates that could be used to get the initial motion from but would still have to use techniques such as tracking, spline warps and corner pins to match the plate. I also used tool like clone and revel in the roto paint node in areas where the clean plate did not match at all.

This project taught me time management, having to work around university projects. It also advanced my clean up skills with more practice. It was also my first project working directly under a supervisor who was able to give me consistent updates on which area's needed improvement.

A Personal Project I did in my spare time with some assets I was able to download which I believe are originally from The Creator Movie. Using the 3D assets it provided I wanted to create a moody atmospheric scene to practice and improve some of my composting skills. This was the first where I was really able to spend time and explore whatever I wanted, I didn't need to worry about deadline's or briefs. As such I was able to explore a lot of new techniques which will be helpful for any future projects I do.

Set In Stone is the final project of my time at University. I was a part of a joint team combining the Animation and VFX departments, with 5 other compositors to work on multiple shots throughout the film.

Tasked with multiple shots for this film the simplest of which required only CG comp. I was collaborating with my 3D artist to get fix any problems with my renders which couldn't be handled myself within nuke. I was able to explore using makeshift relight techniques to add contrast and detail without needing to re-render shots. I was also tasked with clean-up on one of the longer moving shots, for which I had to combine 3D and 2D patch techniques before matching the depth of field change with a bokeh node.

I was able to complete all shots in time for the deadline of the project, with constant feedback from our tutors and peers to make sure we created an excellent product for our final result.

For this Team project as part of our 3rd year at escape studios I was responsible for the opening shot of the film. This entailed a full CG background, so I would need to make sure to use a variety of reference to create a photorealistic result with my final grade.

My first problems however, came initially with the plate prep for keying. I had to remove many tracking markers from the greenscreen and the overlap with motion blur from our actor cause me many issues. Looking back on this problem, my solution was inefficient and next time I would look towards an edge extension technique to resolve the issue.

For this shot I was also able to explore and play with the particle system within nuke. I wanted to explore and challenge myself so I decided to try and create an atmospheric re-entry effect entirely within nuke. I was able to achieve this quite well I believe and was extremely happy with the final result.

Overall this project allowed me to explore more areas of nuke I had yet to use, while reinforcing some of my basic fundamentals and teaching me some better techniques for future projects.

I originally joined In Depth as a Roto/Prep Artist during my first year of study at Escape Studios. Upon joining the project at the start of the post-production stage, I took on the role of Compositor due to a lack of overall artists.

Throughout this project I was learning a lot of new skill sets and techniques that would greatly benefit me into a head start of knowledge down the road. I practiced some of my first keying work, with greenscreen footage, where I struggled with despilling and refining the thin hair detail of the actors. I was also learning about the process involved in virtual production at the same time using unreal engine in a direct link to nuke with the unreal reader node. This was and still remains a new process so we often found ourselves struggling with issues never seen before and have to work our way around them.

Overall this was the first big project I worked on. It taught me much about the process, pipeline, skills and teamwork I would have to develop for future projects, and am thankful for the opportunity to have worked on it. It is not the best work I have produced but it remains one of my favorite for it was the start of my career working as an artist.

Lightfall is a passion project currently in production, directed and created by Sam Carpenter. Set in the Star Wars universe during the high republic era a young Padawan must face off against an unknown dark force.