Old 2008 Demo Reel
This reel is a bit dated but, my work I am confident is solid. I’m giving a little break down into the process which I’m glad to say I’ve kept all my assignments and notes(somewhere).
So I purchased this desert aerial from FootageBankHD for $600. Thirteen secs with a cross fade of sand dunes at the beginning. I proceeded to dust bust debris and hairs from the film and then did a full track in Syntheyes. With cloud data and manual tracks I align from shadows in the footage, I solved for the sun which I later used in Maya mental ray general daylight render. I just tweek the photons some of the settings a little. It’s of preset lighting with the sun, hdri map, photon control, mental ray, etc. Next came modeling the landscape so the background mountains(originally snow mountains) could be card projected and rendered with depth of field, ambient occlusion, shadow layers, etc. Also, so shadows of all objects would cast accurately on landscape. All cg models were modular consisting of towers, shack, crates, and barrels. I was concerned about being too repetitive but, now looking back there was still room for more models at different angles and placement. The models were further modified after final placement and model cards added to layer more textures of sand. A small bit of masking of native element by way of rotoscoping. Finally, adjusting the passes, apply filters, grains, and recreating flare to match native footage. There’s plenty of room for improvement now that my eye has gotten better.
In the second shot from Artbeats the train was removed, sky replaced, and scenery rotoscoped in layers so the shot could be projected and an artificial camera movement added. To be honest, I ran out of time to model the environment so proper parallax would be achieved. Being that these shots were critical to my graduating we opted on the conservative side. Again, to be clear, other than footage, everything else is mine down to the painting of texture files. The shot was painted in many areas and regrain to match native footage. Then a evening lighting and stormy background mood was integrated.
I can’t really touch the FootageBankHD again because of copyrights but, I think Artbeats is a little bit more flexible and maybe if I have all my files. I could go back and model the environment. Of course it took me days just to find this final reel. Might be more of a headache than starting from scratch. I am sure the clean plates don’t have enough pixels to cover and I would have that issue. It doesn’t seem like much but, as a one man team covering roto, texturing, modeling, mattepainting/cleanplate, tracking, simple animating, rendering, lighting, and compositing, I feel like people don’t appreciate the work that goes into a clip. I feel like I’m forgetting something. You get so deflated when someone comments, “Hmm, that’s a simple shot. Why didn’t you fill in the blank?” Sooooo much easier when your at the company just compositing. That said, I really admire those artists that create amazing reels. So wish I was that talented.
Well, that’s a little bit of what I can do. I’ve been slow these past two weeks as some of that time was used to get my family life in order. I’ve got one clip I’m excited about but, have yet to figure the direction I want to go with it. Nuke is starting up a contest so technically that’s a project to be had. I know someone is going to make that beautiful and being that I lack ideas I feel I would be duct taping thoughts across good footage. And I don’t want to do that. The girl in the shot is on a mission and important data is flying about but, that’s where I’m stuck. I got a stupid idea but, I don’t know if I should proceed with it. Plus my ideas are always grand so it is nowhere near easy. I better go to bed now that I’ve got this and my resume updated(7:27am). I threw myself into crunch cause I kept staring at the monitor. I know I should have walked away but, I needed to accomplish something. Now I’m gonna pay for it cause I could be expecting phone calls or emails. Ahhhhh, it’s Friday. I just need to fix my hours by Monday.
Paul Baccam 