Visual Effects: Compositing Article

The design magazine Creative Cowasked me if I would share some of my thoughts about creating cinematic composites using the author's favorite shot of The Least Likely trailer as an example - the street fight scene.

The article will be coming out next month in their free magazine.  You can have a hard copy sent to you if you're in the US (and maybe Canada) or a pdf emailed to you for international.  You just need to sign up and request it here:

http://magazine.creativecow.com/

Here is a block quote from the interview which I lifted from the preview draft of his article I saw.  Mostly this would only be of interest to cinematic artists:

"A composite of this scale requires balancing two potentially conflicting needs. The first is detail. I believe that you have to tell your story on every level. Whether it's noticed or not, it's definitely felt. And this is a business about what you feel. A spaceship looks more interesting with a bunch of scratches and other distressed surfaces because they tell a story about what that ship's been through.

"The other need is simplicity. A lot of people get into visual effects because they like complex things; but to actually complete things, simplicity is key.

"Obviously these two needs are in conflict.  You balance them by asking yourself , “What is this shot about?”  This shot, for example, was about an escalating chaos.  This means that anything that supports the idea of an escalating chaos is important – even in the details; anything that goes outside of that realm into any abstract concept that might come up in the artists' mind is simply adding complexity and potentially distracting from the controlling idea of the shot and, therefore, harming the shot and the ability to finish it on time."****