VFX Final from Ricky Martinez on Vimeo.
Info: Breakdown for "Replicant", a visual effects short based on an abandoned concept from Hampton Fancher's 'Dangerous Days', the first Draft of Ridley Scott's Bladerunner.
Despite the very tight schedule, my team and I were able to submit a project. What I wanted to get out of it was a better understanding of comping 3D passes in Nuke. My emphasis is compositing so I believe it would have been more ideal to work with students who want to pursue 3D, that way my teammates and I would have more time to tackle the comp challenges rather than attempt to model/texture/light/animate the 3D elements; I prefer tackling compositing issues which is what I primarily wanted to get out of this project and the class overall. The project works as a compositing experiment and I was able to practice my nuke skills a bit more.
That aside, I also learned what not to do in cinematography and if I had more time I would've avoided hot spots, balanced the whites, and shot at a color temperature closer to the final grade. In terms of Supervising the visual effects I originally planned to shoot a greenscreen plate but the idea was scrapped when trying to solve the lighting issues to match the face plate with the hands. I learned that it would have been better to shoot both plates as a single element as a "live action pass", then the single plates of the hands and face and blend them all. This was my second goal for the project, to get a sense of how to supervise and plan a visual effects shot, which I hope to someday do in the industry.
Overall for what it is, in the trial and error of things, its the project that taught me a lot of 'what not to do'. So it helped in that sense, and in better executing future visual effects shots, a greater challenge I'll have to face for my senior thesis.
