Mark Fry: VFX Reel

I found a show reel by VFX artist Mark Fry

(Unfortunately embedding has been disabled, so here is a link to Mark Fry's Youtube upload: link)

The Video demonstrates a wide array of abilities as well as showcasing the artist's special skills. It seems Fry is very talented when it comes to keying out elements using the rotoscoping technique. This demonstrated quite strongly through the 'Total Recall' rotoshots. Fry also includes 'personal projects.' 'Workbench' shows a successful CG set extension. On top of this the composition shows a strong ability to key out unwanted elements within a piece of footage, by removing the actor's fingers. This is also demonstrated in a later piece of footage where Fry removes some wires from a piece of children's play apparatus. We also see examples of tracking, and clean ups using colour correction tools and alpha masks. There are also some new elements present such as camera projections which I am not yet aware of. Simply the inclusion of 'personal projects' shows a genuine passion for VFX and a will to learn and develop independently. Fry also includes a list of software he uses, which I imagine potential employers will check when considering compatibility with the software their company uses.

Overall I feel this show reel is well balanced, and successfully demonstrates a collection of essential skills when it comes to compositing. I believe this could be the benchmark that potential employers would expect to see at an industry level.

Modelling the 'Termite Mound' Ship

With this design being a very chaotic organic one, I felt I could experiment with using only the front image plane from my concept drawings, and leaving room for some creative freedom within Maya. The  design was fairly simple, so after separating all of the spikes within the design from the main UV, I again placed in the coloured grid to make sure the texture was flowing nicely around my model:

I made a few very subtle tweaks to the UV map, but generally the parts in view looked very tidy. This lead me on to the texturing stage. Again I used Nagel's custom skin brushes to get the tessellated bee hive effect. On top of this I did a bold what I like to think of as a 'circuit board' effect. The bright purple pattern follows through some of scales created from Nagel's brushes, as well as breaking off into smaller patterns. This gives the impression that some form of energy is flowing through the ship, giving this organic meets synthetic theme to the design. My original bump map consisted of a desaturated complete image, with the levels tweaked to add more contrast and depth in the texture:

I decided I wanted the purple pattern to maintain the bump texture of the layers beneath, giving the effect that it is glowing from beneath the skin of the ship, almost like a painted on effect. I am aware of self illuminating maps in Unity, which perhaps is something I could look into in Maya to give a greater glow effect to the pattern layer. For now, here revised bump map texture:

The Rough Cut

Before progressing further with the modelling of my 3D scenes and assets, I put together a rough edit with my collected footage:


This edit focuses on the timings of each shot and sound placement. The timings will be useful when animating the 3D elements to correspond with the length of the shots. This means I am not spending time animating what would be cropped out in the final composition. Also, the consideration of the sound composition at this early stage will mean I am not scrambling for sounds at the last minute, which  often tends to happen when focusing on the visual side of things and neglecting the equally as imported audio elements. For the final shot I used the same sounds from my after effects moving composition. The other sounds were a mix of online clips and recordings from the original shoot.

As you can see, the final green screen shot was fairly straight forward when it came to shooting. Our filming group had two redhead lights shining through dampeners to illuminate a green screen cloth. With another group member I then held some green screen silk over the actor hiding most of his body. In hindsight, there were a few different approaches I could have taken. I will likely be masking right up to the actors neck when compositing, meaning the green screen will only be relevant around the head. With this in mind, I could have potentially set up the small pop out green screen and grabbed a close-up shot of the actors head, to then scale down to size in After Effects. With our group setting up the large green screen cloth anyway, this wouldn't have saved any time, but is something to be aware of in the future.

I feel with the rough cut completed, I can can now begin animating as soon as possible.

I felt it would be interesting to have a look at the pre visualisation or 'previs' process at a professional industry level. The video below shows how  3D pre visualisation was used for 'X-Men: First Class'. A devoted team incorporate 3D animation tools such as motion capture to clan out the framing of shots, prior to filming. Perhaps it could have interesting to produce a 3D mock-up as a group to inform the framing our shots in advanced: