3D Animation

Movie Magic

December 2, 2008 December 2, 2008 I’ve mentioned before that one of my goals upon graduation is to work in the field of visual effects.  It’s a lofty goal to want to be the person who animates Iron Man flying or Spider-Man swinging, so I’m prepared for a fairly long stint of paying my dues and doing all the grunt work that the entry level guys are forced to endure.  These are little things like tracing a character’s outline by hand (or digital pen, rather) in eight hundred frames of footage.  Not a lot of fun, but if the software can’t handle it, somebody’s got to do it manually. In our class, we get to play around with the compositing software Adobe After Effects, to combine our rendered frames of animation into viewable movies.  After Effects is a pretty powerful tool, and as a hopeful FX artist, I was really glad for the opportunity to learn it as part of the 3D program.  Besides its utility in collecting our renders, I figured the experience with a well-known visual effects program would give me an edge when looking for that FX internship.  I even tried to impress friends and family, telling them, “Oh yeah, now I know After Effects!” Imagine my shock when my good friend and fellow CDIA student, Kat Alix-Gaudreau, invited me to oversee both the visual and special effects for her final student film.  What a surprise!  What an honor!  What did I get myself into? Photograph by John Corbett. At first, I wondered if it was possible.  Did I really know enough to say that I could handle such an important role?  Wasn’t I supposed to be sweeping up for the FX guys or acting as a lowly production assistant on a film with a combined cast and crew of somewhere around 30 people?  But then I realized: taking those first big steps beyond CDIA was going to require taking a couple of smaller ones while still inside that safety zone.  Not that I’m treating Kat’s film like a digital guinea pig, but trying and failing on a student project is a more useful learning experience than trying and failing out in the real world. It reminded me that when you’ve got the skills, you have to have the confidence to say, “I can do this.” That’s the kind of thing that’s going to impress a potential employer and get you a job when school is over. There is still one more day of shooting, so I haven’t had a chance to see any of the footage yet, but I’ve been on location for two of the three shoots, and it has been a blast.  This set’s got it all: swords, daggers, axes, stunt coordinators, evil cultists, gunfire, and kung-fu monks.  Here’s a sneak peek: Photograph by John Corbett