Bring the Sex, AKA preorder Adobe After Effects CS4 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques
Tuesday, December 16, 2008 at 4:30PM As the author of The DV Rebel's Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap, I can say with some authority that a book should be easier to read than its title. Although by Mark Christiansen's Adobe After Effects CS4 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques has a longer name than its predecessor, it's for a darn good reason—the addition of the word's visual effects and compositing. Mark's Studio Techniques books have always been unique among After Effects books in their focus on visual effects compositing for film and television.
I had the honor of writing the foreword for AAECS4VFX&CST, wherein I ask and answer the question of why one might want to do such a crazy thing as composite visual effects shots in After Effects CS4:
You’re holding a book on visual effects compositing in Adobe After Effects. There are those who question the validity of such a thing. Some perpetuate a stigma that After Effects is for low-end TV work and graphics only. To do “real” effects work, you should use a program such as Nuke or Shake. Those techy, powerful applications are good for getting shots to look technically correct, But they do not do much to help you sex them up.
Sex them up? Indeed. The central premise of the foreword is that Hollywood is not about reality, it's about glorious unreality—and while there are applications and books that focus on helping you achieve realism, the ambitious effects artist is much better off learning to make things gloriously, cinematically unreal. Sexy even.
“Make it look real.” That would seem to be the mandate of the visual effects artist. Spielberg called and he wants the world to believe, if only for 90 minutes, that dinosaurs are alive and breathing on an island off the coast of South America. Your job: make them look real. Right?
Wrong.
I am about to tell you, the visual effects artist, the most important thing you’ll ever learn in this business: Making those Velociraptors (or vampires or alien robots or bursting dams) “look real” is absolutely not what you should be concerned with when creating a visual effects shot.
Movies are not reality. The reason we love them is that they present us with a heightened, idealized version of reality. Familiar ideas—say, a couple having an argument—but turned up to eleven: The argument takes place on the observation deck of the Empire State building, both he and she are perfectly backlit by the sun (even though they’re facing each other), which is at the exact same just-about-to-set golden-hour position for the entire ten-minute conversation. The couple are really, really charming and impossibly good-looking—in fact, one of them is Meg Ryan. Before the surgery. Oh, and music is playing.
What’s real about that? Nothing at all—and we love it.
You'll have to get the book to read the rest, except that I'll give away the ending:
After Effects may not be on par with Nuke and Shake in the tech department, but it beats them handily in providing a creative environment to experiment, create, and reinvent a shot. In that way it’s much more akin to the highly-respected Autodesk Flame and Inferno systems—it gives you a broad set of tools to design a shot, and has enough horsepower for you to finish it too. It’s the best tool to master if you want to focus on the creative aspects of visual effects compositing. That’s why this book is unique. Mark’s given you the good stuff here, both the nitty-gritty details as well as the aerial view of extracting professional results from an application that’s as maligned as it is loved. No other book combines real production experience with a deep understanding of the fundamentals, aimed at the most popular compositing package on the planet.
Reader Comments (14)
Did you update your foreword from CS3?
You were talking sexy back then.
Even though I'm running CS3, I put my order in for the new chapters/scripts.
FWIW: There's an "ebook" I found of AE7ST on a download site. That is so much easier to navigate than a book of that size (I bought the book and wish it came with it). Any chance of ebooks available as a courtesy for buyers of CS4 edition? It's easier to scroll screens than page-screen-page-screen-page-oh, where'd I goof up?
Yep, it's a retooling of the chapter I wrote for the CS3 edition.
I thought that the foreword alone was worth the whole book. Not to say the rest of the content wasn't valuable, but the foreword was fantastic.
I would say you should write your own book, but you did.
how much is this book different from the previous edition (cs3)? was it just rewritten to match cs4 tools? anything new inside?
what dorkman said.
except " write another book"
What a great review. I'm constantly amazed at the things that can be accomplished by a skilled After Effects artist. While I'd love it to render faster, preview faster, have something like a node system, and have more powerful 3D features it's still my bread and butter. I would be a very frustrated filmmaker without it.
Rick
There are two books that I read out of everyday, the DV Rebel's Guide and After Effects Studio Techniques. It's an incredible book. Super easy to read and understand. Be interested to see what's new in CS4.
Actually, I'll agree with Jason's revision to what I said.
The DV Rebel's Guide is a great, practical guide to no-budget filmmaking. As a companion to that, I would buy a book more like the AECS4ETCETC foreword, one which approaches filmmaking and visual effects from a more philosophical standpoint.
The DV Rebel Guide talked about the "how." Mark's book talks about the "how." Lots of books talk about the "how." Somebody needs to put out a book talking about the "why."
Awesome. I have every edition since 6.5. Can't wait to get this for Christmas!
Great point Stu, the plugin support alone for AE make it all worth it. I personally love to run AE and Fusion in tandem so that I can experiment in AE and also use Fusion with its ability to read a great number of AE plugs and more technical abilities (I know I know there are some that disagree on this). Great point overall though.
I'm gonna miss the Japanese Punk from the cover of the cs3 version.
For a "What's new in the CS4 Edition?" visit the author's blog at http://www.flowseeker.com
As an owner of multiple eds, they are worth owning and holding onto. My copy is set to arrive on Monday.
i disagree its critically important that as many people as possible buy nuke!!
(a mate of mine develops nuke and presumably the more nuke is bought the more she'll get paid)
:D
I owned that book, the CS3 version... do it need this one? What is the differences?