The Keys

You do it by following some simple guidelinessimple, yet so important in delineating your success or failure as an effects compositor. The keys are

• Get reference. You can't re-create what you can't see clearly and in great detail. Great artists recognize many features of the world that the untrained eye fails to see.

• Simpler is often better. Effects compositing is complicated enough without overcomplicating it with convoluted processes and needless extra steps. A robust effects pipeline is typically made up of the simplest available solutions, and it's usually worth the extra effort to simplify your workflow however you can. Occam's Razor, which states that the simplest solution or explanation is often the best one, applies in spades here.

• Break it down. This, more than anything else, addresses the biggest error made by beginners: They try to solve problems using a single solution, applied globally to the whole shot or one of its elements. For example, beginning artists tend not to look at individual color channels when matching foreground and background colors. As Chapter 5, "Color and Light: Adjusting and Matching," lays out, you must be willing to examine the individual red, green, and blue channels and adjust them separately to match overall color effectively. And if this advice applies to something so fundamental as color matching, you'd better believe it applies to more complex effects.

  

  The willingness to go beyond the one-button solution and break apart a shot into adjustable components is what will make your shots stand out. Otherwise you're just relying on luck to overcome laziness.

  
  

• It's not good enough. This sounds discouraging, doesn't it? What you must take away is the spirit, rather than the literal truth of this statement, and always strive for the best result possible.

If you let your guard down and settle for "good enough," someone's going to say it…

"That Looks Fake"

Can't you just hear that flat condemnation, uttered with no subtlety or restraint by the teenage kid sitting behind you at the multiplex? That kid is sometimes wrong (I've heard this label slapped on a shot that I knew had no visual effects), but you can hardly argue with the sentiment if your goal is to fool the skeptical viewer.

A little bit of that petulant teen lives in all of us. Ideally the statement will evolve to "That looks fake because…" with you able to complete the phrase using your eyes, your observations of the world and those of your colleagues, and information from a source like this book.

A somewhat more civilized version of that rude teenager shows up at dailies on a feature film effects project, but with the title of Visual Effects Supervisor. Here's how dailies generally go: At the start of a workday, a bunch of people get some coffee, go into a dark screening room, watch a shot more times in a minute or two than the average audience will watch it in a lifetime (unless of course it's a shot from Star Wars), and you are told why it doesn't look right. It sounds like a harsh way to start the day, but actually, this is absolutely where the real process of doing great work is rooted.

Relentless dissatisfaction is one of the keys to successful visual effects. Try not to confuse it with actual discouragement, no matter how harsh your own (or someone else's) criticism. If it doesn't look right to you, it doesn't mean you're a bad artist; it simply means you have the taste and discrimination to know the difference (a wise statement I first heard from my former colleague Paul Topolos, now at Pixar).

What Compositing Can (and Can't) Do

The type of full visual effects pipeline used to produce a big-budget feature film contains many roles and specializations; depending on your point of view and on the shot in question, the compositor's role can be the most crucial or the most denigrated. Typically, with the possible exception of a colorist, the compositor is the last one to touch the shot before it goes in the movie, so it's an important job if only for that reason.

To a large extent, a composite is only as good as the sum of its elements. The best compositors have a reputation for producing gold out of dross, building a great-looking shot despite poorly shot plates and slap-dash 3D elements. But compositors still need elements to do their work, and poorly shot or created elements typically lead to an equally poor result.

If you're still learning how to composite, you may be creating all of your elements yourself. That's great, because compositors benefit from understanding the disciplines that feed into the shot. For example, it's essential that you understand how the camera gathers images so you can mimic the reality created by a camera. If you're comfortable as a 3D animator, those skills will help you navigate the 3D capabilities of After Effects, and you will learn how much time you can save fine-tuning your shots in 2D rather than tweaking them endlessly in numerous 3D renders.

As a compositor, you have to know about these other disciplines, because to some extent you're re-creating their results from scratch, and you have far more room to cheat and make up your own rules. A cameraman cannot go further than the limits of what a camera can do, but you can. And one dirty secret is that sometimes you must cheat actual reality to make your shot believable.