What's It Like Working At A VFX Studio?

today's video is very different from my normal style of content this is a day in the life of a visual effects artist I'm going to be taking you into the office with me today to show you my day at work give a little tour of the office and the space that I work in I've been given permission to do a breakdown of one of the comps from the recent Amazon commercial that I worked on as a VFX lead and then at the end I'll be answering some questions that were asked in a Q&A on Discord about what it's like to work as a VFX artist so here we go let's see where the day begins whenever I'm working in the office my day begins by cycling to work we have a hybrid working system so I tend to work from home a couple of days a week and then go in two or three times a week as well I live out here in East London and the office is a bit more Central so it takes me about 25 30 minutes to get in on the bike I much prefer this to taking public transport it's nice to do a bit of exercise in the [Music] morning when I get to the office we have some really nice bike storage and showers in the basement so I can get in lock my bike up and then have a nice shower and get ready for the workday and then this is me arriving at the office I came in through the basement entrance so I could lock my bike up but this is what the office looks like if you come in through the front door we have a really lovely bar and reception area which is where most of production work there's a couple of color grading Suites up here and a meeting room and we're also really fortunate to have our own cinemar in the office then downstairs is where most of the VFX magic happens we've got some flame Suites which is where I spend a lot of my time especially during client presentations then we also have an open area which is where people can sit from all departments once I get to my desk I tend to log on have some breakfast and then check my messages and see if anybody sent me anything important from here the day starts properly and I can start doing my job as a compositor which is the perfect segue into the next section what you're looking at here is the new script for one of the biggest shots on an Amazon commercial that I worked on last month I was fortunate enough to go on set for this and I was also the VFX lead and the only compositor on the job so I comped all of the shots and I've been given special permission to do a breakdown of this shot for this video which is really exciting because normally I can't show the kind of stuff that I do at work due to NDA regulations so this is a pretty unique behind the scenes look at what goes into a professional composite on a large scale commercial so first of all I'll just play the shot and you can see what's going on the idea is these beams of light are bursting out of the Amazon box the box is fully CG and there's a load of other VX stuff going on in this obviously like lens flares and smoke so I'm going to go through and break down all of the different layers starting off at the top this is what the plate looks like as you can see we filmed with a lot of practical lights so there's some lights inside of the box and we also have these led Astera tubes that are really good because you can program animation into them so we were able to animate lighting interaction to move upwards which gave the Practical light some movement and embedded the VFX in really well later on one of the first problems we encountered with this shot is that the client felt there was too much blue spill coming from the Practical lights so this first group of nodes you can see here is actually a color grading past that was exported from Da Vinci resolve where they sucked all the blue out of the plate so it basically completely desaturated the blue and the purple channels this is what it looks like with a bit of a grade on it in Nuke and then I'm using a very feathered mask just to put that back on top with a key mix then the next thing I'm doing here was one of the more complicated parts of this shot and it's a bit of an invisible effect because once it's done you'll never know what's going on here is as well as the lighting interaction from the Practical lights we also had someone using a leaf blower to blow the girl's hair as you can see here this wasn't automatically timed or anything it was just done manually by someone triggering it as close as they could to when the lights came on and unfortunately the take that the director liked most was one where the leaf blower actually came in a little bit late so you can see the Practical lights actually come on about seven or eight frames before the wind kicks in so what I had to do for this shot that was actually quite complicated was I took some of the frames before the lights came on and then used various techniques of distorting and warping and tracking The Clean Plate into the later bits of the shot and then dissolving it off until the timing of the leaf blower and the lights matched this first one here was for the girl and it was just a case of taking a still frame of her and then grid warping it slightly throughout the shot the more complicated one was on the guy because he's actually taking a step forward in the shot as this is all happening what I decided to do was use Smart vectors to track that clean frame onto him as he's walking forward if I play it you can see on a lot of the frame it does some really crazy stuff like it Wars his face in a really odd way but it worked quite well on his legs and lower body so I soft matted them out again using a mask so now I've rebuilt most of the things in the shot that have that annoying blue light on it that comes on too early and what I can do from here is keep them on for longer and then dissolve them off once the Practical leaf blower kicks in and this is the before and after next up I'm just using The Clean Plate that we shot to remove the Practical lighting tubes from the frame on set once we'd got the main take I just asked the lighting crew to move the Practical lights off to the side slightly and then run the same animation on them again so that we then had a plate of what was behind the lights when they're covering it that I could then put in later this is what the render for the CG box looks like this was tracked into the shot and animated and then I also got a lighting pass that was a separate render for the interactive light from the beams coming out of the box and then lots of glows and things coming from inside the box as well to give it a bit of Life speaking of Bright Lights this is what that render looks like this was from Cinema 4D and it's essentially loads of parters of different beams coming out the renders on their own look fairly crude and once you put all the comp stuff on top they really come to life it's basically just loads of straight lines that have some noise running through them and they've got various different colors then I've got hero one which is for the core that gives it a bit of thickness and intensity towards the center there's lots of color grading going on here so I'm using a couple of masks to make them hotter at the base when they're coming out the box and then they get a bit darker towards the top then these grade and saturation nodes are making sure that they're exactly the right color for the Amazon blue which we were trying to match and then I start to put some glows and stuff on it just to give it a bit of life cuz it's obviously a very intense light source Behind these lines there's also some glows and I multiplied some smoke over this to give it some movement and make it look a bit more interesting this is just a 2d element of some smoke I time offset it and retimed it slightly to get it to match the speed and intensity of the stuff that was coming out of the box and then I took the render of the lines and blurred it loads and multiplied the smoke over the top of this if I play it here you can see what I mean then next up there's some particles that are also added coming out of the box this is quite subtle and it just gives it again some more texture so there's four different pares of the particles in this I'm grading each of them slightly differently so they're allight slightly different brightnesses and colors after this there's a slightly different render that's also from cinemar 4D this was from a different CG artist this is for the lights that go along the seam of the Box just before it bursts open then we got some Roto she needs to go on top of the CG box once it's all added in I outsourced most of this so we sent out some Roto for her hair and her body and her shoulder and then I did a little bit myself as well so I just Roto her arm when it's in front of the Box just cuz that was really quick to do when all of that gets combined it looks like this so I now have a nice cut out of her that I can put on top of all the VFX that have been added so far and then we get on to the fun stuff lens flares and lens dirt first off I'm adding a little bit of camera shake so as the Box explodes open there's a bit of like a rumble feeling in the shot which just gives it some life then I've got a couple of lens dirt images I'm doing the same thing as the glow where I'm blurring the footage loads and then multiplying these lens dirt images on top of that and I used an expression on the merge node just to make them flicker ever so slightly as well and then as well as the lens dirt I put some actual lens flares on Top This is just built from a load of different lens flare images that we had in our 2D Library so I just took some of the frames that I like from this Frame held them so they're just a still frame so this is each of them on their own and then I start to combine them all one by one until it builds up to a really nice flare element and then this gets plused on top as well with the flicker that was also on the lens dirt and that is the last thing I did on this shot before rendering it for the final version there's probably a lot more VFX in this than you realized especially with all the cleanup and everything but overall the result is just a really fun VFX shot I had a lot of fun comping this one now for the next part of the video I'm going to be answering some questions that people asked me on Discord about working in VFX so one of the questions are you scared of AI taking your job I already use copycat quite a bit which is the uh machine learning tool in Nuke so that is for mainly for matte generation I use it a little bit for cleanup as well but yeah quite often I'm using it essentially in the place of Roto we also use mid journey and stuff not so much of it is for the compositing stage but I think a lot of the pipeline here that utilizes it is for stuff like previs and concept art and just like getting ideas together without having to go down the route of getting someone to spend 3 days making something how did you get your job when I was leaving College essentially the options were go to university or go into like an immediate internship or an apprenticeship or something I felt like I already kind of knew enough about after effects and blender that I didn't necessarily think I would benefit that much from going to UNI what ended up happening is I applied for an apprenticeship so I went along for the assessment day all the recruiters sat in a semicircle and watched all the people that got selected do a team building exercise it was very competitive I think over 500 people applied and they shortlisted the top 14 after we did the team building exercises we did a little kind of speed dating thing where we went around and had 2 minutes with each company the next morning someone from the mill rang me to say we'd like to offer you the job which was really cool so I started off there as an apprentice it was meant to be for 2 years and I finished the apprenticeship in 18 months that was kind of the beginning of it all I suppose what are the best places to apply for internships SL apprenticeships and what should we know about applying for them uh a lot of it is just online the one that I found was by a company called nextg for other parts of the UK or internationally I'm not so sure but I imagine there are similar schemes I just Googled VFX apprenticeship London it was one of the first things that came up I'd imagine if you go on LinkedIn and you look at company websites quite often they advertise when they're looking for apprentices and things so LinkedIn is quite a good place to try and find something to apply for as well do work long hours um not So Much Anymore coffee and TV is actually pretty good in terms of looking after people we have a system called dos which stands for days off in L and that basically means that if you work over time so say you work a weekend or you work a few lates you get a day back annual leave or on holiday in terms of how much time I actually work the end of the jobs can get a little bit busy on average I'd say a lot of time now I finish on time and if I have to work late it's till like 8 till 9:00 it's pretty good I do the occasional dat a weekend it's pretty rare but I'm very comfortable like I feel like my work life balance these days is very in my own hands I don't feel overworked at all which is really lovely to be able to say what is your favorite job that you've worked on there's probably a few it's difficult to pick one because there's been lots and I would like them for different reasons I'd say if I had to pick one my all-time favorite would be I worked on the advert that was released for the Wizards unite mobile app game so I spent about six weeks doing Harry Potter spells and CG Dementors it was pretty nuts and I'm I'm a massive Harry Potter fan Harry Potter is one of the reasons I got into the visual effects industry CU I liked those films so much and so to be able to work on something that was like officially Harry Potter branding by W Brothers was very exciting what does your day consist of in terms of tasks to be honest it varies a lot uh it depends on the day so for example today we had a call in the morning with the director of the advert I'm currently working on and then the clients came in so I had six people satat in the room on the sofas over here and basically I sat in this seat here and then they sat there on the sofa and watched what I was doing on the screen and we basically played through the advert discussed sort of where we're at and it was like a progress update essentially that is specifically for my job role as a lead so not all artists have to do that that's just the job of a lead is to like do the client presentations and director calls and things and talk through the process and have a lot the creative discussions the day-to-day obviously my primary role is I'm a compositor a nuke artist so I do a lot of compositing and then also equally as a lead it's my job to run the timeline so I I have the edit and I drop all the VFX shots into it as we're going throughout the the job I send whips on a regular basis so we export like progress updates of where we're at occasionally I go on the shoots if it's something that I'm working on and we think it would be really beneficial for the lead to also be on the shoot then I try and go on the set so that I'm there the whole way through the process which makes the post production a little bit easier sometimes if you're a part of conversations on set with the directors or the agency then you just go into the post a bit more well informed which can be very beneficial then at the end of the day myself and a few others were able to go to the music video of the Year Awards which was a real privilege I'd be lying if I said I didn't handpick this day to choose for this video because obviously this is the more glamorous side of VFX we were nominated for best visual effects in a music video for our work on storm Z's toxic trait we didn't win unfortunately but it was lovely to be able to go and it's always fun to be able to celebrate your work at these kind of events after that I made my way home and that's where this video ends thank you very much for watching I hope this was insightful into what it's like to work in the visual effects industry leave a comment if there's anything else you'd like to see maybe I can film another one at some point and until then I'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Alfie Vaughan

Views: 44,662

Keywords: vfx, studio, whats, it, like, day, in, the, life, vlog, coffee, and, tv, marvel, film, commercial, music, video, awards, industry, apprenticeship, internship, job, career, how, to, Q&A

Id: x22yAXab9RI

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 09 2024