Post Magazine

What gets compositors' creative juices flowing? Their answers are varied and fascinating. For some, it's the work. For others, it is good directors and the opportunity to be involved with a favorite subject. Some are jump started by an agency treatment and the entreaty for creative inter- pretation.The end result is a huge motivating factor ; some compositors are stoked to guide clients to the most effective message. T H E M AG I C "Mostly it's the potential for magic. If you do your job right as a compositor, something that wasn't there before suddenly materializes in front of your eyes. The sense of wonder from that and from playing a part in the stor ytelling process, enabling the stor ytelling process to a large degree, is what keeps me inspired," says Elad Offer, creative director/ owner/compositor at LA's Digit (www.digit- international.com). "Other things play a part in the process, but when you boil it down, it's really that end result — the magic of vi- sual storytelling — that keeps me inspired." Inspiration, by definition, is one part emo- tional, one par t intellectual. Offer needed both for the Get Smart feature film (Warner Bros., 2008) on which he and his compositing team had to make the skydiving sequence look continuous and believable out of a hodge-podge of material. Digit had to marry three types of shots: stunt people skydiving shot on film, actors against back projection screens and those same ac- tors against greenscreen to create shots for which there was no footage. The latter two categories were shot with a Thomson Viper digital cam- era.The client, Mosaic Media Group, contracted with Digit for 100 shots. Offer was the lead Flame compositor on the skydiving sequence. He says his photography background and compositing training at Gravity, a digital ef- fects house in Israel, have made him adamant about the artistic integrity of a shot, which comes from an understanding of depth of field, composition and color. "Good compositors have a strong understanding of the ar t basics, not just the technical parts, even though those parts are important too," he says. On Get Smart, there were continuity issues, certainly, as well as distance ratio problems that were solved with a lot of rotoscoping and reinser ting elements into different places to make the ground look closer or the distance between the airplanes look smaller. Complex compositing jobs like this are more frequently coming Digit's way, says Offer, who says Get Smart's director, Peter Segal, is a "most efficient user" of compositing abilities to achieve his final vision. He had a particular penchant for combining action from different shots for the perfect take because he liked the action of one actor but didn't like the action of another. Offer says the director works this way a lot, and that they immediately did a similar spinoff project for him (Get Smart's Bruce and Lloyd, DVD, 2008). Autodesk Flame, running on Linux, with GenArts Sapphire plug-ins to visually smooth things out, was used on this sequence as was Apple Shake, running on a Mac G5. Flame enabled them to work in a 2.5D environment, which helped them do parallaxing (spatial positioning) more easily, layering the actors in Z- space as they flew through the clouds. Shake was used for a lot of rotoscoping and greenscreen shots because it was less expensive and there were more Shake ar tists available. Offer says Digit's business model is to supplement its bare-bones crew with freelancers. Additional technical challenges included making sure the amount of grain was consistent to the shot. Pulling keys from the digital camera had its own set of problems because there was still some ar tifacting and round edges but, in the end, just achieving a consistent look across the different formats took an enor- mous attention to detail.The Flame's color correction tools and ability to cut to- gether the sequence were critical, he says. T H E WO R K "The majority of my inspiration is related to my work, sor t of ideas feeding off other ideas, snowball effect," says Theo Groeneboom, head of the Eyeon Fu- sion depar tment at PrimeFocus London (www.primefocuslondon.com). "I love traditional art and find much inspiration in the old painters, the way the lighting is done, the way the strokes are applied. But I also get inspiration from emerging technologies, how to use it in favor of the aesthetics of a shot or a scene." Prime Focus does feature film compositing and is primarily known for end-to- end post production, from CGI to DI and video effects. Groeneboom had no formal art training but he grew up with computers and ar t all around him, and he was active in the Scandinavian "demo scene," which taught him a lot about creativity and the concepts of art. "I've found, in most cases, that clients are quite happy if you show a genuine interest in their project as how to make it better. In some cases, clients don't have a clear picture in mind. This is usually when I get a chance to do my own magic on a shot," he says. "I start with an idea that's refined into something more concrete, be it professional work or personal work." He believes that at the end of the day, it's the pictures that really matter."I might start off by doing crude animatics or Photoshop sketches and move them into a timeline to see how different shots or scenes would fit together. Usually at the same time I worry about camera timing and shot layouts, making it easier for me to judge if the sequence is working as a whole.Then it's just a matter of chiseling out the different pieces and [trying] to not divert from my original idea too much." Groeneboom says they use Fusion for all their hard-core compositing needs since its flexibility allows their ar tists to quickly jump from commercials to fea- tures, and its solid 3D workspace within the compositing tools makes a big dif- ference in the way they work.They also use Eyeon's Generation for managing all the Fusion jobs to keep track of plates and versions. T H E D E TA I L S Alex Prichard, compositing supervisor at The Orphanage (www.theorphan- age.com) in San Francisco agrees with Groeneboom, saying, "A lot of my inspira- tion comes from the work.You're given a task where you're going to be integrating CG rain into a bunch of things, so then the artist and myself we're paying more at- tention to rain than anyone you would know. We're driving home on the Bay Bridge watching how rain reflects in the headlights and bringing that back to work. It's an incredible experience just going through that whole process. We do do some amazing stuff." For Adam Sandler's film Don't Mess With the Zohan (Columbia Pictures, 2008), The Orphanage composited 230 shots that ran the gamut from clean-up work, www.postmagazine.com October 2008 • Post 35 Sea Level's Glen Bennett, who finds inspiration in good directors, used the Flame on this Guitar Hero campaign out of DDB/LA.

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