Real Men Comp With Film

Be careful having dinner with Mike Seymour.

He was sharing with me his nerd-joy over being able to interview Jon Alexander at ILM about the history of optical compositing. I offhandedly mentioned that I had once, out of pure lifelong curiosity, re-created the optical bluescreen extraction workflow using After Effects.

Oops. The next day Mike was in my office with a camera. Watch this whole video. My bit is nerdelicious, Jon’s is wonderflully insightful and grounding, and it all adds up to a great taste of what fxphd members get to enjoy heaping tons of.

Read the companion article here.

Comments

[Ken Fisk]

I thought this was great I showed it to my VFX 2 class (After Effects Comping). Not sure if they were into it as much as I was. Thanks!

[Stu Cone]

Fantastic. For an FX nerd like me, this was riveting.

[Robin Heemstra]

I watched this when it came out in July, and I was amazed at how incredibly labour intensive this method was, even in After Effects (let alone in the physical world). I had never given it much thought, mostly because it's from 'before my time' (whatever that might be), but I'm glad I live in a time where this sort of stuff can be accomplished easily and relatively quickly on an inexpensive home computer.

[Samuel Hall]

I absolutely loved this. You don't know how long/much I've wanted to know how optical bluescreen compositing works. It was never presented to me in a way that made perfect sense like this.

My complete thoughts here: http://bit.ly/oLOLQH

Thank You.

[William Dempsey]

Hey Stu,

Loved your optical assembly recreation. Reminded me of how much I love After Effects and digital technology. Looking back it seems so difficult now . At that time it was miraculous and all the extraneous issues like endless wedge tests were taken for granted . Except of course when the micro switch missed its stop and took an extra frame after hours of work and you would run screaming from the optical room yelling things that I will not repeat here. :-)

Now see what you've done! You got me geising .

Bill