My Inspiration!

I went on my fellow students blog's and a lot of them showing and talking about films and animation that inspire them. I think I should do that. Obviously my heroes aren't directors or animators but compositors and vfx artist! I probably watched about 200 demo reels and vfx breakdowns in the last 1 and half years and I gotta say whenever I see an amazing shot being torn to pieces from green screen footage to to the small fog and dust elements I actually get that little buzz, that probably made me want to become a vfx artist (funny enough I actually entered the course with the intention of becoming a 2D animator). When I find a good demo reel of an relatively unknown compositor posted somewhere on those vfx forums and community sides, I check their names on http://www.linkedin.com/ to see what happened to them and in most of those cases I actually find their names in big studios. That really gives me hope, that if I keep on working hard on my skills I will eventually end up with a successful career.

I found this demo reel of an Austrian compositor working in Germany for a small post production company that mainly does mediocre TV adverts. But his stuff is really good, nothing special but good and solid.

http://reels.creativecow.net/film/flame-compositing-reel-spring-09

Typing his name into linked-in it turns out he got a job as a compositor at MPC in London now. I was generally happy for him.

Now VFX breakdowns of films are just amazing. But it's not so much the big VFX shots that impress me that much. The subtle unnoticeable shots are so much more interesting. Like this Fast and Furious VFX Breakdown. http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/fast-and-furious-2009/vfx-breakdown.

I watched the movie and quite frankly I wasn't impressed at all, but that is because of the acting and storyline. I didn't notice any matte paintings though, which is the best compliment to the compositors and matte painters. If their work gets by unnoticed it means they did a good job.

My favourite one is from the movie Hancock with Will Smith. I liked the movie but that last scene, where he jumps of the building into the city was just brilliant and luckily I found a breakdown on you tube. The transition from Will Smith to a 3D character is seamless. I borrowed the DVD and watched it frame by frame with my nose press on the monitor and I still couldn't tell when it happened. Plus the environment work with the 2d Matte Paintings and the 3D environments is pretty impressive too.

Dan Schick is a compositor working on a show called Supernatural. Even though I've heard of it I've never watched it but his show reel makes me want to watch it. The impressive thing is that he works for a TV Show which means less time and probably less budget. He still managed to come up with some really good shots. Especially the one where one character walks into another and they turn into liquids. In movies there would've been an awful lot of artists working on making the whole character 3d(probably motion capture) so they can use dynamic simulation software like Real Flow to do the splash. In this case he just used a lot of layers of waters splashes (ok one layer is 3d) and composite them together and I think it looks pretty good.