The first skill is perhaps the most elusive. It is something I observed sitting in dailies with the great visual effects supervisors of Industrial Light + Magic. Complex shots on their 40th take loop relentlessly on a 30-foot screen. The animator can't see anything but the keyframe tweak he finally nailed five minutes after submitting this take. The technical director stares relentlessly at his particle simulation, pondering coefficients of elasticity. The compositor is the last line of defense. She feels like she's done a pretty good job of putting the shot together, but knows that the motion track could use one more pass of fine-tuning.

Everyone in the room has what is known as Familiarity Disorder. This is the condition that prevents my health plan administrator from successfully explaining my coverage options: He understands the various plans so well that he cannot possibly put himself in my position, which is that I need it explained to me as if I was four years old and mildly retarded. He can never do that because he's too close to the details. In '80s action movie police-chief-speak, he's “in too deep.” Everyone in dailies is in too deep. And that's why the chief needs to take each one's piece and badge and shout a spittle-drenched “You're off the case!”

But not Dennis Muren. His job is to remain objective, and this is a mighty challenge. But I would watch him do this—see the shot every time as if for the first time—and he would skip right past these nuances and details that the various contributors were sweating and say something like, “We should slip the sync of that explosion back a few frames. It will cut better with the next few shots that way.”

Not that Dennis would ignore the details. But he would not focus on them when something bigger, something about the storytelling properties of the shot, was still not quite right.

How do you develop this skill? It is a matter of discipline. You need to be intimately familiar with the details of the shot in order to work it to perfection, but to keep it from getting overworked, you have to consciously remind yourself to stand back and at least try to see it objectively. So cure number one for Familiarity Disorder is

Cure number two is

Cure number three is an easy one:

None of these three cures work as well as the last one. The last one is your ace in the hole—but you have to be selective about how you play it:

One of the reasons that working against Familiarity Disorder is so important is, and I really hate to break this to you, there will always be something more you could do to make a shot better. But, chances are, you have a deadline to meet, so you have to pick your battles. I mentioned that Dennis Muren would be selective about how he would nitpick details. What I came to realize was that he was using his ability to emulate the audience's experience to pick which details to sweat. A well-designed shot leads a viewer's eye to specific places. When a defect in some remote corner of the frame was pointed out to Dennis, he'd say, “If they're looking there, we've lost them.” He makes shots for the people who are engrossed in the film, and he prioritizes storytelling over immaculateness.

The discipline of maintaining your freshness to the work your doing will be something you struggle with on every shot. But remembering to struggle with it puts you way ahead of the game. Keep at it.

The second skill that is required when struggling with the Ultimate Question is the reason that the chapter is called “Learning to See.”

Have you ever taken a life drawing class? You should. The supplies are cheap and you get to look at naked people. Don't make me spell this out for you.

In life drawing you'll learn that you have to fight off the part of your brain that knows what an arm is. You know an arm is a long, skinny thing. But the model has an arm draped over a knee, aiming right at you. You see the arm heavily foreshortened or compressed in perspective. In fact, from your specific point of view, the elbow is directly in front of the shoulder, and the wrist is almost blocking it.

Now, of course your life drawing is perfect, but look what that idiot in front of you did. He drew the arm as a long, skinny thing. He did that because he knows that's what an arm looks like. He drew what he knew, not what he saw. And his arm be lookin' fonky.

We do this all the time in visual effects without even realizing it. When asked to add an element, such as a haze effect, a lens flare, or a dust hit, you think “I know what that looks like” and add it to the shot. And it looks stupid. Why? Because in truth, we don't really know what things look like.

Let me use some theatrics here and ask you to read that last sentence again:

Our brains are very complicated, sophisticated instruments that connect to our eyes in a slightly fancier way than an S-Video cable. When we visually absorb things, we don't see images, we recognize objects. We don't see colors and shapes, we see people and oncoming trains.

Don't believe me? Pop quiz: What color is the rearmost tomato in Figure 15.1?

Figure 15.1. What color is the rearmost tomato?

Did you say yellow? If so, you are correct. But check this out: Figure 15.2 is a crop of that image, showing just the tomato.

Figure 15.2. Ok, now what color is the tomato?

That patch of color is clearly green. How did you know it was yellow? Your brain looked past the color on the screen and saw that the whole image has a blue tint to it. Knowing this, and knowing a little about tomatoes, your brain filed that as a yellow object.

Your brain second-guesses your eyes like this all the time. College students quizzed on the height of a guest speaker guessed taller when they were told he was a visiting professor than when told he was a grad student. Eyewitnesses to crimes report widely differing descriptions of the criminal depending on their personal experiences and associations.

As compositors, it's our job to know that our brains are unreliable image banks—they store ideas, not pictures. So we can therefore correlate that if we create images based on what we know, we will be basing them on bad data. This is where that digital camera comes into play.

Check out Figure 15.3's picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. Every once in a while this monument is half enshrouded in the “marine layer” like this. (I am told that to call it fog is blasphemous.) But what if it wasn't on the day when your shoot needed it to be, or what if you are compositing a matte painting of a future city with buildings so tall their tops get cut off by clouds?

Figure 15.3. Here's some big, orange bridge I just found walking around one day.

Zooming way in, you can see how the cloud obscures the bridge in a way that is more complicated than a simple transparent overlay (Figure 15.4). The cloud actually acts like mist on your windshield, diffracting the light before completely occluding it.

Figure 15.4. An enlargement of Figure 15.3 shows light diffraction through clouds.

When I first started seeing this in my photography, it changed the way I composited smoke elements. I got in the habit of using the alpha channel of the fog or cloud or water spray element to drive a compound blur of the background.

Here's an example. Figure 15.5 shows a clean photo of the bridge, and Figure 15.6 is the cloud element to be composited over it.

Figure 15.5. The same bridge is bereft of brume.

Figure 15.6. If the weather doesn't cooperate, extract a cloud element from another photo.

If you do a simple A over B comp, you'll end up with something like Figure 15.7.

Figure 15.7. The cloud element is simply layered over the bridge photo.

Now check out that same comp with a subtle compound blur in Figure 15.8.

Figure 15.8. The same composite with Compound Blur. See the difference?

The blur simulates the diffraction of the light and ties the cloud element into the shot. This is a great example of how even the most basic layering requires pre-composing in After Effects. Compound Blur uses the pixels from one layer to control how much to blur another layer. But the trick is that it uses the pixels before any effects of transformations. So you need a pre-comp where you reposition and possibly even animate the cloud layer. Here's how to set it up:

If all goes well, your Flowchart view should look something like Figure 15.9. Now, if you move or even replace your cloud layer in the Cloud Anim comp, the rest of the comp will reflect those changes automatically.

Figure 15.9. Take a look at the bridge composite in Flowchart view.

In compositing, we talk about integration of elements. Yes, this means color correction, matching black levels, and tracking in the right motion, but the more advanced tricks of integration usually can be filed under the general idea of “everything in the scene affects everything else in the scene.” Much of the reference you collect will yield revelations along these lines.

Check out Figure 15.10. Imagine it's your job to add an annoying CG alien next to this handsome guy. The 3D artist has lit the alien to match, but dropping him in A over B leaves the shot looking sad.

Figure 15.10. What a handsome guy.

Take a closer look at the guy by extracting him from the shot (Figure 15.11).

Figure 15.11. Isolate Handsome from his scene.

When you isolate him from the scene, it becomes very clear that he has a lot of contamination from the bright background behind him. Your eye can cancel this out in the same way it can allow you to see that the green tomato is really yellow, but when you isolate the guy you prevent your brain from “knowing” that it's right for the dude to look washed out if he's against a bright sky.

That CG alien is going to need more than just color correction, he's going to need light wrap, or a simulation of this contamination. This is a popular effect that is available as a plug-in and tempting to overuse. Because of the order of operations in After Effects layers, however, it's also very easy to use light wrap effect plug-ins incorrectly. For example, if you apply light wrap to a foreground layer and you tell it to wrap to the background, it will grab the pixels of the background before any color correction you may have done to it, which is not good. In the interest of becoming more mighty, create a light wrap effect from scratch using only layer blend modes and the Fast Blur effect, using the process detailed back in Chapter 12, “Working with Light.” Here it is in brief:

And that's your light wrap element. Create a new comp that has this light wrap pre-comp on top of the foreground on top of your color-corrected background. As with the last example, it's both the blur size and the opacity of the layer that you use to dial in this effect. Generally you will use big blurs and small opacities, but there are times where you might use just the opposite. And you can play with various blend modes for the light wrap layer; Normal, Screen, Lighten, and Add are all good options.

Note

Fast Blur and Gaussian Blur are the same (at Best quality), except that Gaussian Blur has no Repeat Edge Pixels option. So you might as well throw Gaussian Blur away.

Sometimes a photo will suggest a cool technique like this. Other times it will simply help you dial in the look of an effect. When I was asked to create the most dreaded of all compositing effects, a lens flare, for a shot in Star Wars, Episode One: The Phantom Menace, I asked John Knoll to shoot some reference the next time he was on the motion control stage. In between explosions and lightsaber sparks, John had the crew shoot a series of flare reference passes with various lenses. We picked the one we liked, and I spent three days (and about 17 nested After Effects comps) matching it exactly.

Photographic reference can help you get the facts straight in your shot. The highlights on your stompy robot look just like the ones on the live action car he's about to step on—no one can argue with the realism of that. But photos can also help us with another, far more nebulous concern.

Our clients are making movies, and movies are designed to do one thing: elicit an emotional reaction from the audience. Even though our clients know that they are using technical tools to achieve this goal, they are still reacting emotionally to the images we show them. This is true whether you're working for a first time indie auteur or James Cameron. Clients react from the gut—as well they should. But here's the catch: They critique in technical terms.

This is a problem that I suspect jazz musicians do not have. When they are jamming and creating a new tune, I bet they are totally comfortable talking in emotional terms about their work. “Dude, this just isn't reminding me enough about the ills of society. We need to get more strife into this track!” OK, clearly I know as much about jazz as I know about running an oil refinery. The point is that our clients are not comfortable saying things like “This shot isn't scary enough,” or “This shot just needs more umph!” That may well be their reaction, but rather than simply saying that, they feel compelled to suggest possible solutions. “Make his teeth more wet,” or “Throw a lens flare in there.”

At The Orphanage, we once had a very tech-savvy client who was obsessed with a shot that he felt was falling way short on photorealism. Every time it would come up, this client would explode with reasons why it was not realistic-looking. This contact shadow isn't right. There's not enough detail here. These particles are too bright. We looked at shots that had finaled already and saw what our shot was missing. We made it darker, more blue, and we added contrast. The shot finaled. We addressed the emotional shortcomings of the shot and the technical problems, legitimate as they may have been, magically went away.

The lesson here is: Don't be afraid to make your shots beautiful. And your photography should help you. Chances are you've taken a hundred sunset shots that look like you shot them with a camera phone. Sunsets are hard, especially with digital cameras. But I bet you've got one sunset shot that you just nailed. It's a thing of beauty. Well, compare it to your hundred crappy sunsets and analyze the differences. And when the time comes to create a dusk shot of the enemy base, eyedropper the color palette straight out of your good one.

The matte paintings of Cloud City in the original The Empire Strikes Back are perfect examples of this. These paintings by Ralph McQuarrie are not very photoreal. But it so does not matter. You know why? Because they are purple and orange. They are beautiful, and they strike an emotional chord in the viewer. Have a smooth Colt 45 and watch your precious laserdiscs of the original Star Wars movies, because you truly belong here with us among the clouds.

If you take enough boring pictures of your car (Figure 15.12), one of them will eventually look decent (Figure 15.13).

Figure 15.12. A boring photo of a non-boring car.

Figure 15.13. Those are speed fangs.

The emotional resonance of a shot can also be linked to a common technical mistake. One of the biggest sins of visual effects shots that are built up from scratch is that they tend to contain no overexposed or underexposed elements. Skies are often a good example of this. Show me a shot with a perfectly exposed blue sky with no blown-out detail, and I'll show you a visual effect. The reason that the notorious car comp, in which the view out the window of a vehicle shot on a green-screen stage is replaced with moving scenery, usually looks wrong is often that the artist failed to slightly overexpose the exterior. Figure 15.14 shows the kind of reference that can help you nail your next car comp.

Figure 15.14. Dare to overexpose the stuff you comp out the window.

Night exteriors are the worst culprits. In the middle of a sequence of inky black night shots set off by artificial but highly cinematic rim lighting, you can smell the matte painting coming from a mile away. It's the only shot where you can clearly see everything except where the light is coming from!

The eyedropper, the Info palette, and our friends Copy and Paste can help make tangible the intangible reasons why some images pop and some go thud. You are not just a technician assembling elements. You are a salesperson, trying to get the audience to buy the shot, warts and all. Use your reference and your dirty tricks, and close that deal.