Recently I’ve been getting into VFX work. I feel like it might be wise for me to develop a niche interest when it comes to filmmaking, as right now, I’m a bit of a generalist. Sure, if you’re working with barebones crews it’s a good to have skills in a wide range of fields, however I imagine high end production would involve everyone having a very specific role. If that is the case, I might not be very hireable if I don’t have a specialty (I imagine the niche jobs also pay better!).

As much as I like the freedom and creativity that comes with small crews, I do like the idea of eventually having a job with regular hours. Maybe I should start teaching myself the skills needed to work in a VFX studio? That could be fun. I’d imagine it’s probably a rapidly industry growing too. I think my holiday project for the semester break will be downloading Nuke and Houdini, and trying to teach myself their ins and outs (I hear they have a vast amount of documentation and tutorials for beginners too). I would also love to double down on the VFX capabilities of Blender, which I have studied in the past. The worst case scenario would be learning a new skill just to realise its ‘not for me’, which I’d say isn’t really that bad of a situation.

A few weeks ago my local movie cinema hosted an Isolation Filmmaking competition. Within the space of a week I threw together a little experimental film as an excuse to showcase some of the techniques I had been playing with recently. I still haven’t come to a conclusion as to whether or not I like the end product, there’s definitely many things I’d like to change, but I’m definitely proud of the fact I managed to commit to a project and get it all done within a week alongside my uni commitments. I learnt quite a lot in the process too.

Here’s the film if you’re interested to see it:

I spent a considerable amount of time creating the particle cloud effect, as that kind of camera tracking and compositing was something I’d never done before. It involved an incredible amount of finessing, and I spent much time adding and subtracting small details to make it look believable (adjusting the way the cloud would cast shadows, etc.). My worst nightmare was creating something that looked like it was made by a beginner, and I’d often spend hours just trying to change a tiny detail, which ended up being a great way to learn what works well and what doesn’t.

Another effect that blew me away was the computer generated faces animation. Originally I wanted to make a super cut of my friends faces over Zoom, however when I thought of the time which would be required to record even 20 faces, I decided it would probably be more effort than it was worth. I’d recently been to a webinar on Machine Learning and it’s applications for artists (of all mediums), and I thought it might be a good opportunity to try out using a Machine Learning algorithm to generate the faces I would’ve otherwise had to record myself. This ended up being a huge timesaver. After modifying some code for probably 45 minutes, I had all of the materials I needed. It was incredible just how quickly it could be done for someone with very little experience. All of the faces shown in the video are likely never before seen, none of them are real people, I was extremely ‘weirded-out’ by the process to say the least.

I think this video will provide a good proof of concept for my future work, as there’s a lot of concepts/effects I only touched the surface with. I would like to take what I did in this project and develop it into bigger and better ideas for my next projects.

P.S: I would also like to note just how remarkably CRT televisions reproduce colour; I don’t think I’ve ever seen an LCD/LED panel reproduce skin tones as beautifully as my hard-rubbish CRT screen. It’s quite remarkable.