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
then layering them onto the master plate. Inevitably this involves lots of rotoscope. It is important that these be shot with depth in mind- it does not help if persons from one plate looks are in the same place as persons from other plates. Plates should be shot in depth conscious layers. Another thing is to watch out for the unique player- someone whose clothing may stand out, like that one lady in bright red, or that one white horse! Anything to repetitive gives away the gag - it could be a distinctive character, it could be a distinctive motion.
Pride,Prejudice and Zombies trailer at IMDb
The Last Witch Hunter at IMDb
Once I finished adding hordes of extra and cg zombies to my shots, I was asked to help out the paint department in the Last Witch Hunter. The task was to clean up camera shutter flicker strobing. I carefully found bits of image from adjacent frames and puzzled the shots back together seamlessly removing the strobing from frames selected by the paint supervisor.
As I finished up Zombies and Witches, the snow melted and my plane was cleared. Bidding fond adieu to my compositing, roto and paint comrades at Cinesite, I headed back to sunny and warm California!
Alas, these assignments were not big hero shots, so none made the trailers.
