Cupid

First off, I really have to thank my friend and former work colleague, Melvin, for providing me with this opportunity. As per my previous post, I have spent a lot of time learning about VFX compositing, and he came to me with the offer for a VFX sequence in his short film. The timing was perfect, as even a few months earlier, I wouldn't have felt ready to tackle it (I certainly wouldn't have turned it down though!).

Melvin is presently studying at AFTRS, Australia's premier film school. This is his second year, and he's spent the last several months directing Cupid, a short film about that dude who shoots love arrows (not a euphemism).

I'm not certain if I should be sharing my shots from the film, since, although my shots are completed, the final film is not. But I of course am putting them into my demo reel, so they'll be posted soon enough. So for the interim, here's a test I did for the major effect shot (that would be Shot 7 -- oh, how I hated you!):


Gives nothing away, right? Well, let's just say that it's a reveal shot, obviously of a character. To explain what's going on would be to spoil the film's major conceit, and I'm not a spoiler! At any rate, that was just a quick and dirty test to discover how to do the shot in question. The final result is quite different to what you see above, but tests like this pave the way for the final, more complex composite. From the above shot, Melvin was able to instantly send me feedback on the elements he liked, and the ones he did not, although I must say that the core of what you see in that youtube vid is still intact.

What's changed is the stylistic approach. This is because the design was never really nailed down at any point during the process, instead being an elusive, amorphous blob of potential that manifested itself more and more clearly as time went on. It's a quirk of the manner in which Melvin and I worked together, and the upshot is that we learned some imperative lessons when the fat lady started singing.

So consider this a teaser: I intend to outlay the top lessons I've learned from the experience in a future post. For now, I'll tell you that it damn near wiped me out! It's almost a week since my part in all of this ended, and I'm still not fully recovered. But we literally took it to the last possible second to complete it all. I'm talking about starting the final render 9 hours before it needed to be handed over for grading. That after a long, sleepless night and some sleep-deprived delerium in between short periods of work. But I took comfort in the fact that this is exactly what happens in the industry at large. Livin the dream, man ... livin the dream!