Visual Effects and Today

Digital compositing  is an essential part of visual

effects that are everywhere in the entertainment

industry today: In feature films, television commercials,

and many TV shows, and it’s growing. Even a

noneffects film will have visual effects.

It might be a
love story or a comedy, but there will always be
something that needs to be added or removed from the picture to tell the story.

That is the short description of what visual effects are all about—adding elements to a
picture that are not there, or removing something that you don’t want to be there.
Digital compositing plays a key role in all visual effects.

The elements that are added to the picture

can come from practically any source today. 

 We  might be adding an actor or a model from a piece

of fi lm or videotape or, perhaps the mission is to

add a spaceship or dinosaur that was created entirely

in a computer, so it is referred to as a computer

generated image (CGI). Maybe the element to be added is a matte painting done

in Adobe Photoshop®. The compositor might even create some of their own

elements.

It is the digital compositor who takes these
disparate elements, no matter how they were created,
and blends them together artistically into a seamless,
photorealistic whole. 

The digital compositor’s mission
is to make them appear as if they were all shot
together at the same time, under the same lights with
the same camera, then give the shots a fi nal artistic
polish with superb color correction. This is a nontrivial accomplishment artistically,
and there are a variety of technical challenges that have to be met along the way.
Digital compositing is both a technical and an artistic challenge.

The compositor is first and foremost an artist, and works with other artists such as matte painters, colorists, CGI artists, and art directors as members of a visual effects team. This team must coordinate their efforts to produce technically sophisticated and artistically pleasing effects shots. The great irony here is that if we all do our jobs right, nobody can tell what we did because the visual effects blend seamlessly with the rest of the movie. If we don’t, the viewer is pulled out of the movie experience and begins thinking, “Hey, look at those cheesy effects!”


So what is the difference between visual effects
and special effects? Visual effects are the creation or
modification of images, where special effects are
things done on the set, which are then photographed
such as pyrotechnics or miniatures. In other words,
visual effects specifi cally manipulate images. Since
manipulating images is best done with a computer,
it is the tool of choice, and this is why the job is known as digital compositing.

I mentioned earlier that digital compositing is
growing. There are two primary reasons for this.
First is the steady increase in the use of CGI for
visual effects, and every CGI element needs to be
composited. The reason CGI is on the upswing is
because of the steady improvement in technology,
which means that CGI can solve more digital problems
every year, thus increasing the demand by movie-makers for ever more
spectacular effects for their movies (or TV shows
or television commercials).

Furthermore, as the
hardware gets cheaper and faster and the software
becomes more capable, it tends to lower the cost of
creating CGI. However, any theoretical cost savings
here are quickly overwhelmed by the insatiable appetite
for more spectacular, complex, and expensive
visual effects. In other words, the creative demands continuously expand to fi ll the
technology.

The second reason for the increase in digital
compositing is that the compositing software and
hardware technologies are also advancing on their
own track, separate from CGI. This means that
visual effects shots can be done faster, more costeffectively,
and with higher quality. There has also
been a general rise in the awareness of the fi lm-makers in what can be done with
digital compositing, which makes them more sophisticated users. As a result, they
demand ever more effects be done for their movies.

Reference:
Compositing Visual Effects
Essentials for the Aspiring Artist
Steve Wright