EKELBRODE CG Composites

For the independent short film Ekelbrode by Benjamin Pierson and VFX by Studio X, I was lucky enough to get the approval to talk about my two CG shots. I was handed over two worrisome, complicated shots that I had to fix in Nuke in a short period of 2 weeks to fix the CG renders and make a seamless integration of them.

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Shot 01

Water Integration

For my first shot, I was handed over this shot of a chemical gun that spits liquid like water. It was already tracked, and rendering it was a matter of integration.

*Some of these Thumbnails are made slightly color corrected for a better viewer experience.

As this was my first shot, it was easy to track, add some keyer to color correct the highlights, and integrate camera fx and motion blur to integrate a seamless effect shot in the same shot.

Here is the before shot without the LUT of the production.

This prepares me for the biggest challenge yet to come.

Shot 02

The Speaker

This shot was handed down to me as a compositing lead after the deadline was approaching, with a week left and the final shot was nowhere close to done with daily updates.

This image is the final shot I delivered to the client.

The first challenge was that once handed the CG files to my previous compositor it was handed without any light, shadow or general passes to color correct the snow.

This gave us less flexibility to color correct and use similar techniques as the water shot. I planned my elements with masks and keyers to select specific areas to color correct.

The second challenge was that the integration wasn't working, along with the light levels from the CG and the texture made the speaker and snow both CG elements fake, along with no information to correct.

So, using noise maps, gradients, and keyers, I was able to match the plate closer and make the speaker look more realistic.

Here is the shot I was handed.

Final shots for both.