Adam Smith demo 2017

This was during my tenure as compositing supervisor at Intelligent Creatures, from the all CG show “The Hidden Life of a Cell”. As supervisor I developed the look of the backgrounds behind the cg using microphotography footage of cellular reactions (yeast and such) projected onto spheres in Nuke, and created Nuke templates so any comp artist could bring in the 3D camera and set up their scene. It depicts a virus connected to motor proteins travelling along a microtubule.

In 2013 I travelled to India to work for Prime Focus on this movie. I was a 2D sequence supervisor and lead compositor, which over there basically meant going from desk to desk doing the work for each artist. Out of 16-20 or so comp artists on the team, only about 3 or 4 could be relied on to do their work without my help, the rest I trained as best I could but there were language barriers.
Smoke Effect
After other teams had failed to find a look for the smoke that Robert Rodriguez liked we were tasked with it. After much efforts with both real footage combined with particle elements we found a mix that was acceptable. They were placed in the scene as 3D cards using the scene cameras brought into Nuke.

2D sequence supervisor and Lead Compositor
These are a select few shots from the whole sequence, the sword slash out of the trunk was solely my shot. The close-ups of Manute and Dwight needed the make-up jobs hidden, the seams were too obvious and the texture of the make-up did not look like skin. I developed an effect with a layered noise pattern that imitated the skin pores and blended the make-up.

Arm Chop:
I painted out the arms, added people to the bg, and comped the cg stumps and blood spray.

Rorschach’s Mask:
One of the best cg pipelines I’ve ever worked on to date. I did all the comp of the mask for these scenes, but also did a lot of head track animation, matchmove animation (jaw and cheek movements), and ink blot animation (done 2D but animating UVs in Maya).

First shot, did all the compositing for the fg scene, the bg had been created and established by another artist. Second shot, did all comping using only cg, stock footage, and matte paintings, no plate.

Did all compositing for all scenes; mattes, cg, lens flares, etc.

2D body replacement
Had to paint out the actor’s body, only the head remained, then tracked on a matte painted body and 2D animated it to matchmove.

Fire reverse time lapse
Using plate footage of the location in the morning, and at night with the fire blazing, combined with cg animation of the logs reforming to create the reverse time lapse.

Stag Man
The Stag Man was shot on green screen for multiple takes, then comped together into the scene.

The Portal
Many artists contributed to the many versions of look dev it took to get this looking good. It finally required a reshoot of water elements after cg just wasn’t cutting it. I was responsible for all the compositing in these scenes, from mattes, to layering and incorporating water elements, to the dissolving of the character in the final shot.

Set Extensions
All of these set extensions were done by bringing objs of the set into Nuke and projecting matte paintings onto them. This saved rendering time and also made it easy to make small changes to the bg by simply adjusting the matte painting. I worked side by side with the cg artists to ensure the objs were broken into usable layers to prevent any stretching or strange overlaps from the camera projection. I also placed the footage of all the bg people into the scenes.

Burning House
They filmed a set piece the same dimensions and from the same angle burning, and I tracked and comped it on.

Set Extensions
All of these set extensions were done by bringing objs of the set into Nuke and projecting matte paintings onto them. This saved rendering time and also made it easy to make small changes to the bg by simply adjusting the matte painting. I worked side by side with the cg artists to ensure the objs were broken into usable layers to prevent any stretching or strange overlaps from the camera projection.

Both of these are co-compositing, because they’re those kind of shots that just get passed around from person to person, I just happened to be the person to work on them last and finish them to satisfactory completion.

More work from my time as Compositing Supervisor at Intelligent Creatures. I helped both with look dev of the cube breakup and the particles of “digital sweat” and developed the comp pipeline. It was accomplished projecting the plate onto tracked geo that then animated and broke apart and came back together. I also comped all of these scenes.

The ultimate 2D paintout challenge of my career: paint out a cross that goes in front of a character with a free-moving camera over an organic landscape of grassy hills. I pieced together frame holds of clean sections to create a clean plate, but had to chop up the clean plate into sections that would animate differently to match the variations in parallax, all while 2D animating and grid warping frame holds of his body parts to match his movement.

I was lead compositor on the first season of “Man Seeking Woman”. I did all comping of the matte painted scene, using volcano eruption stock footage and developed an effect using noise patterns to make the lava streams and pools appear to be flowing and roiling.