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- Thanks for sharing those. Now a bit about you currently. What is your current position and where?I'm actually just between jobs. I finished up at Weta Digital as a lead compositor a couple of months ago and will go to LA end of July to work at Digital Domain as a comp TD.- Where have you worked in the past and What compositing applications have you used?My first job in the vfx industry was at "UPSTART! Filmproduktion" (later known as "Upstart Animation") in Wiesbaden, Germany where I started as an intern in 1997. After a few years of 3D work with 3dsMax and a little bit of poking around in AfterFX and DigitalFusion it became obvious that we needed more compositing people. At the time the first Shake GUI version has just come out so I started learning that (our only compositor was working on Media Illusion and there was no way we could afford another seat).Later, I think it was 2001, while still at UPSTART! I had a peak at Combustion because somehow we had ended up with three different softwares on a job; Media Illusion (which I unfortunately never got my hands on myself), Combustion and Shake. It was quite interesting to see the differences in those packages and figure out ways to link between them as we had to mimic each others set ups to conform all the shots.In 2002 I left Upstart Animation and went down to Munich to start a job at Arri Digital Film as a senior compositor. I worked almost exclusively on film projects using Shake but also snuck into our Flame/Inferno suits occasionally to do warping tasks which at the time was not yet possible in Shake without plugins. Not that I knew much about those Discreet products but I had fellow compositors show me the buttons I needed to know.In 2003 I moved to New Zealand to work at Weta Digital. After using Shake exclusively until late 2005 I started looking into Nuke during our work on King Kong. I used it primarily to create jungle environments at first but during the course of the project switched over entirely.In 2006 I went to work for Digital Domain for a few months where of course Nuke was the exclusive compositor. In mid 2006 I started working for Gallery of Media in Munich developing comp specific workflows and a Nuke based pipeline. They had just decided to make the switch from Shake and needed someone to help with the transition. The first few months I worked from home in Wellington writing custom tcl tools and Nuke gizmos before I went to Munich to implement the work on site, do Nuke training with the crew there and set up more pipeline tools such as network rendering via Discreet's BackBurner and I/O workflows between 3dsMax and Nuke.- What are some of your big creditsLord of The Rings, The Return of the KingI, RobotVan HelsingKing KongFlags of our Fathers- What was the first complicated compositing job you ever worked on and do you remember what you took from that experience?It's hard to single out a job over the last years. A lot of tasks that seemed hauntingly difficult at the time would probably be a lot easier now with more advanced tools and work environments.I took something from every single job I did in the last ten years and this learning process hardly ever stops for any of us. We just need to be aware of what we learn and sharing that knowledge with the team makes for the best work environment.There were deflicker jobs that I ended up creating single lookup tables per frame for or body match moves when I had to track bleeding wounds onto a heavily breathing actor's body without warp tools or a match move department.Some "keying" jobs come to mind as well of course; long blonde motion blurred hair that had been shot not in front of a bluescreen but in front of space lights pointing into camera. Or a ship with dangling ropes and chains and Venice Beach as the "screen colour". Tracking miniature models into life action shots that were shot with a completely different camera move is quite a challenge as well and so is keying actual blue screen when it is three to four stops under exposed and shot on grainy highspeed film stock.I'm pretty sure most compositors have had similar experiences though so I'll stop whining.All in all I believe most of the shots that I remember as complicated would have acquired their complexity via poorly prepared footage rather than requests for a highly complex effects.A lot of these things can be avoided by making sure there is good communication between the crew that shoots the plates and the guys that do the post which is something that is grossly neglected in the industry. Sometimes a simple phone call during pre-production can save you days of work but being on set and communicating with the producer, director and DOP as a vfx/plates supervisor is desirable and far more efficient.Funnily enough, the bigger the project the worse the plates seem to be and in my opinion people that make visual effect films should keep in mind that the creation of the effect shot starts on set, not in the post. - What is your overall impression of Nuke being acquired by the Foundry. I think it's very exciting to see the Foundry look after the development now.Bill Spitzak is still on board which was one of the most important things for me during the take over and with Matt Plec managing the development team Nuke finally is getting resources and coordination that it never had before. Matt is very experienced and talented when it comes to software development, client communications and production work and is therefore the perfect point person for the new team.He was of immense help during the NothingReal times and it's great to have him back on the radar.The Foundry's commitment to high end products and their excellent understanding of requirements in modern day digital compositing, bundled with their policy of collaboration with their customers (rather than the secrecy policies of others) pushes Nuke into a fantastic position. The Foundry has shown great support and commitment from day one and Matt is very communicative about new plans, ideas and changes they intend to make.So all in all you've got a software that has already proven it's worth in high end productions over 12 or so years with an extremely limited amount of coders working on it which is now getting full on resources and excellent coding/management talent looking after it. I've spoke to a few compers at DD and they seemed to be excited about it as well, so that's another good sign.Of course there is always a lot of things that can go wrong when you assemble a new team but in my opinion the existing potential has been multiplied with this move. .
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