Postgraduate VFX Courses Reach New Heights

MA Visual Effects Production (Compositing) students have recently submitted their third assignment and projects. The brief was simple yet challenging: to create a photo-realistic surreal shot with seamless integration.

Mandy Ho Man Ng successfully achieved this masterpiece, which involves another student flying mid-air above Greenwich Park in London.

The quality of such work is based on thorough preparation prior to filming, as well as a flawless attention to every detail during the compositing phase.

Filming

The filming of this plate took place at Escape Studios in front of our own chromakey, also called green screen. In order to capture a realistic motion, the performer was lying on a stool set upon a turn table. A portable leaf-blower provided the necessary wind effect, adding to a sense of weightlessness.

Clean up

Once the plate was captured, the next step was to remove some elements overlapping the live action footage, such as the column of the stool. This very technical process required to animate and distort certain areas of the coat.

Integration

The first step towards integration is in fact "Extraction". The process by which the foreground plate is turned into a mask or alpha. This is typically performed in Nuke, the industry standard software for compositing, through a series of nodes interconnected with one another.

Lastly, the extracted plate is integrated in the background. Notable key aspects of this final task involved precise match-grading, replication of interactive shadows on the ground and even masking out some branches in order to make the foreground plate fully embedded in the scene.