Truly Challenging

Ironically, visual effects artists themselves often fail to notice how complicated it is to craft a shot; until you step back a little bit, all you notice is that you spent long days of hard work making subtle corrections to dozens of takes of a few seconds of film. The individual steps now seem almost unremarkable and trivial, but a complex shot might consist of thousands of such steps, many of which were at some point surprising and revelatory to each of us.

Also, each visual effects shot seems to be unique, and in many ways, it is. Explaining the exact steps to create one shot may be of little use when it comes time to create the next one. Some bread-and-butter effects, however, are done at every studio and are no one's trade secret. These come up all the time, sometimes as a component of a larger and more complex shot, sometimes as the main focus of a simple shot. Every compositing artist should know how to do them.

This book is about those kinds of effects; ultimately, it is about the process of building them up to create a shot that is greater than the sum of its parts and fools the eye of the viewer.

All visual effects can be broken down into comprehensible components (although, to comprehend some of the components might very well also require an understanding of wave dynamics or Fourier transforms). Moreover, very few (even simple) effects can be called complete without being broken down much further than the novice artist typically wants to go with them.

This brings us to the keys to creating the best visual effects, those that are often pretty close to invisible and call no attention to themselves whatsoever. They do not detract from the story, but enhance it, and only later on do you wonder, "How the heck did they do that?"