My first 3 weeks in VFX
Blog of a VFX freshman
You know how sometimes, after a long day or week, when you’re finally home to sit down, the first 3 seconds of your break for the weekend you take a deep breath and say, “Well… fuck me.” That’s been me for the last several weeks. Its been difficult writing articles since starting at Framestore, not because I’m lazy but because of, well look at the image below, it pretty well sums it up.
My head has literally been Nuked with information overload.
A month ago I moved into an apartment in New York for a summer internship as a matte painter and compositor. I think its important for other artists trying to break into the industry to know what it might be like when they join. There’s plenty of information from industry veterans on what to expect, but coming from the bottom up has a different character.
So grab some tea, sit back, and enjoy the brutal honesty of my experience in New York and as a VFX intern.
Day one at the studio was orientation day. We all showed up in the lobby and shortly after, we were logging into our accounts and setting up our profiles. There was a studio tour of all the vfx rooms, meeting rooms, the general area where people sat on the roof top with an incredible view of New York. Okay, nice and easy...
The week prior to the first day, I had walked around New York getting lost trying to figure my way back home. I took the same train between two stops for about an hour before I realized I was on the wrong train going home. Having experienced living overseas, nothing shocked me too much. Being in a big city with many people didn’t scare me and figuring out how society works in New York was, well it was easy. Okay, except for the 2 inch cockroach walking on the floor in the middle of my floor. DEAR GOD I panicked. Russia was cleaner! I hate cockroaches…
Hard Mode Enabled
Day two through week 2–3 was difficult as hell. First off, to anyone reading this, don’t show up an hour earlier then you need to. I was getting up at 6am to be at work by 8 when nobody showed up til 9:30–10am. It was stupid weird being at an empty office wondering what happened to everyone. As friends say; “Don’t Ian Yourself.” I eventually figured out the working schedule, now I show up at the right time not looking like a vampire/zombie.
“You’re going to start puking nuke, haha puke Nuke…” ~ lead compositor.
The first two to three weeks were hardcore learning Nuke. For someone who doesn’t know 1% of nuke, my head felt like a punching bag. My brain hurt every day. The first week was a huge crash course on Nuke. All day every day was asking questions, following the example script (which were huge), mini tuts here and there. Thankfully there was another intern there who was learning to be a compositor and had a bit more experience than me to help. I thought after a week or two my brain would refuse to let me shove any more information into it.
I’m an eager person and wanted to show up on the weekend for extra practice but a senior compositor said to take the weekend off. I’m happy I did, it allowed my brain to retain all the information and not go Kaboom! That following Monday, Nuke was surprisingly easier to follow.
Okay… So take breaks, let the data soak in. Check!
You’ll get a test shot before a real one
We were given finished shots for a commercial as warm-ups. I’ve learned that this is quite typical process for interns. I guess it makes sense too, it’s work that doesn’t carry risk, has a target you can aim for (you’re trying to recreate the original finalled version) but still has some real-world value. It was helpful having a project already completed to follow step by step. It allowed me to tear the scene apart and study how things worked. Reverse engineering is your friend.
Once we’d proven some competency we got work on live shots. The lead compositor on a shot would be our mentor. They would assign us shots and brief us on what needed to be done. Most of the time the job was doing the roto work and then to hand over the work to the compositors to complete. As I’ve learned, roto in live action is a huge part of the job for compositors. With commercials there is a tonne of clean up to be done. Its surprising how much work goes into one scene that lasts less than a second.
I think one of the smartest things I did was to hover around the compositors area while they worked on the big commercial and film shots. Thankfully my mentor Conrad made me aware that you have to be careful how much you bug these guys, they’re crazy busy and not always in the mood to talk or share. When they were though, I have been able to sit down with them and ask questions as they work, which is insanely helpful, you really learn fast when you can see exactly how others do it.
There were even some days when a mentor has stayed after work to go over nodes or workflows with me, showing me what to specifically focus on and what are the most common mistakes people do and how to avoid it. The compositors at Framestore have been so damn helpful, patient and polite with me and understanding that more of my focus is Matte Painting but allowing me to learn the basics within the context of matte painting and compositing.
After almost 3 weeks, I finally got my first matte paint gig at the studio. YESSSS!
It was such a relief to take a small break from Nuke and to do what I’m best at. I was given a few scenes to do both the clean up and set extension within Photoshop. It was such a breeze, I completed the first DMP in about 5 hours. They were expecting it to take a few days because I was a intern. I think this really helped me finally stand out with my skills. They passed me another 2 similar works and I’ve made sure to smash them out of the park.
So far it’s been phenomenal working at Framestore. Nuke feels like a whole untapped world that I’d only scratched the surface of previously and everyone has been extremely helpful.
At this point my advice to those out there would be to figure out what core software the artists in your target field use. For matte painting it’s Photoshop, Nuke and Maya. You have to be at least proficient in 2 of these 3 I think. Obviously it’d be great to know all 3, but that can be a lot of work.
Next week I’m at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver with MattePaint. If you’re coming to the event swing by the MattePaint booth (#336) and say hi! I expect it’ll be a crazy story with so many VFX studios in town so I’ll be covering my experiences of the trip once i return.
Stay Curious, Stay Humble.
