The boy who could fly: PAN

Free poster at FanPop

The great team at WOLF & CROW,  tapped me to come in as a finishing and stereoscopic compositor and  on their great amazing animation for the film PAN.

This involved several sequences, including a stereoscopic backstory  tale of Pan and Hook told in pixie-dust. In the trailer (IMDb) are clips from the sequence.   With animation locked for 2D, this needed minor refinement and completion in stereo.  Mainly the 2D version had a lot of forced perspective that had to be removed, requiring subtle animation changes that would give the same feel with less forced perspective.

Next I undertook some color correction, mainly fixing some of those over-exposure superwhites we all love on a number of shots.  With high-color work, sometimes the beautiful design will posterize in the high end as it transitions to super-whites.  The artistry I add is to get some detail in those superwhites, so they can be exposed down without posterization.  This also involves careful blending back into the 0-1 range.  Sometimes these superwhite problems are in one or two channels, resulting in an intense chromatic look that, while desirable, can make final color grading difficult.

When you look at the trailer, look for my work at 0:23 and 0:32.  Here you will not see the stereo, my main contribution to the shots, but you can appreciate the animation and imagine the challenges of stereoscopic production.


IMDb has the trailer

Battling Zombies and Witches

After a few small advertising gigs with BPG Advertising and others, I headed across the northern frontier in early 2015 to snowy Montreal to work as a Comp Supervisor.  Sadly, on arrival, I was informed no such position was currently available.  So I jumped into the role of compositor for the feature, Pride, Prejudice and Zombies.   

Crowd Extensions Lessons

Now these were crowd multiplication shots comprising multiple plates, shot with running extras, without any consideration of depth layering, so zombies were sort of running through one another when the shot was slapped together.  A lot of roto by a very talented group of artists, some tracking, lots of color adjustments and .... fini.

Plates for crowd extension require rotoscoping out sections of each plate and