Work
Illuminarium Immersive Experience
During my time in Illuminarium, I was tasked with working on a highly complex project involving 5-6 minute-long shots with a resolution of 21k, which were projected on a large-scale wall at the Illuminarium venue in Atlanta and Las Vegas. The technical complexity of this project presented significant challenges, but the experience was both unique and rewarding. I am grateful to have been a part of a fantastic team and to have had the opportunity to contribute to this groundbreaking project.
With that being stated, I am pleased to present the selected few of the shots on which I had the privilege to work for both Wild and Space.
2021 Wild Safari
Fever Tree
One of the standout shots from the Wild project in my portfolio is Fever Tree, which presented a unique technical challenge requiring extensive keying and 2D compositing. The background, expertly crafted by Jesse Flores, is a still matte painting, against which I carefully removed the idle animals in the foreground through precise keying. To ensure seamless continuity, each animal was meticulously looped to provide continuous movement throughout the shot's duration of approximately 6 minutes.
Here are couple of breakdowns of this shot when it was a work in progress:
Work in Progress Breakdown
Work in Progress Leopard Breakdown
Doum Palms
Work in Progress Breakdown
I worked on the Doum Palms shot as my first project for Wild, which presented several challenges in stabilizing and camera stitching. As with all the Wild shots, this one required combining five footages, as shown in the breakdown above. The elephants in different z-depths posed a unique challenge, as they crossed the stitch line between the footages. After discussing with my VFX leads, we decided to add a tree in the area where the elephant does not step, which covered up the duplication happening in the middle ground and background elephants. For the foreground elephants, I replaced the duplicated areas of their bodies with a fixed version that I composited. One of the highlights of working on this shot was the set extension. I enjoyed exploring different source footages to matte paint a seamless extension that matched the horizon line level of the adjoining shot.
Shown below are some close-up shots of the elephant that I stitched together, as well as a close-up shot of the baboon which was filmed in a green screen studio. As the lighting of the sand and the baboon did not match the background, I color-corrected the baboon, its shadow, and the sand individually to achieve a seamless blend between the foreground and background elements.
Close Ups
Mara Main Road
In the initial version of this shot, I undertook the task of stabilizing the footage of the giraffes and creating seamless looping of their movements for an extended duration. Due to the low quality of the original footage, I decided to replace the existing grass by incorporating various strips of CG grass renders that we had available. By meticulously placing and covering the scene with these renders, the majority of the grass in the shot was replaced with CG grass. The grouping of the giraffes was sourced from a single footage and composited in a way that blends seamlessly with the other giraffes present in the field.
Creative Direction of Mara Main Road V02
After delivering the Mara Main Road shot, my team and I made a collective decision to further enhance its visual appeal. I was fortunate to have been given the creative director role to add more elements to the shot, such as additional trees and giraffes in the background. Following the supervisor's approval of the proposed style frame composition, I presented and briefed another compositor before handing over the project to focus on upcoming assignments.
Fig Tree
The Fig Tree background was derived from a high-resolution photograph, as the original footage, much like Mara Main Road, was deemed insufficient in quality. To construct the scene, only the sky footage was utilized, necessitating the animation of the plain and mountain colors to accurately match the sunset. The lion footage was extracted and skillfully composited into the scene. In order to depict the lion rising and sprinting, a composite of three distinct takes/footages of the lion was generated, incorporating the lion's rise, turn, and run movements into a single, seamless shot. Finally, to enable an endless running cycle, the lion's motion was seamlessly looped.
Balanite Trees Dawn
I took over this beautiful sunrise shot to composite in a couple animals. The first animal in the list is the leopard; it was keyed out and looped so it walks across the shot and walks back. The next animal is the caracal. I also looped the caracal and timed it so it jumps up when the cg birds start flying away from the branches. Another animal I worked on is the ostriches. I looped many different running ostriches from a different footage so that they run forever in the background.
2022 Space Walk
Moon Base
Night
Sunrise
Day
This is one of the moon chapter in the Space show! I had the fun to composite a shot that gives the audience a glimpse of the futuristic base on the moon. Some of the challenges I had with this shot was matching the lighting change of the background moon surface render to the foreground models of the moon base; they were separate assets with similar lighting but not exactly the same as some cg passes were just stills. I was given the pass to the cg model’s sunlight animation, but still needed to animate the grade of the models so that the emission dims down when it’s day time and glows up when it is night time. Same thing applied with the bounce and diffuse AOVs of the models. I also had fun animating some lights to bring more life to the shot and compositing the many drones that fly in and out of the shot. The beauty didn’t provide any strong light source on the drone, so I brightened up the area that has the orange tone to make them look like a brighter emission.
The shot above is one section of the wall in the space(B wall), and when you combine all the walls, it looks like this:
Moon Base In-Room View
Moon Approach
Here is another shot in the Moon chapter, where I composited the Apollo command and service module(CSM) flying across and around the moon. The fun part about this shot is that I was able to color correct and readjust the milky way to make it more visually pleasing. With this shot, I mainly spent time scaling and animating an image of the CSM and the moon for the CG artist to reference so that we can find the right composition for them in the space. Once I received the CG render, I spent time color correcting and adjusting the bright highlights along with adding a bit of glow to make them look coherent.
Moon Approach In-Room View
Nebula
I got the privilege to work on this beautiful nebula shot, initially composited by a senior compositor. I took over the work to add some finishing touches after and mainly spent time working on color correcting the variety of colors, especially adjusting the highlights. I added some saturations where it’s needed or tone down on the extremely blown out highlights of the nebula cg render. There were many alpha issues on the nebula where it would be shown as dark spots or artifacts on the soft edges of the nebula, so I went ahead to fix them. The main challenges of this shot was navigating through the heavy script and checking the work. Since most of these shots are hard to play back in the nuke script, I was working blindly, one frame at a time until I felt like I was ready to render them. Then I would publish to ftrack to check my work in progress, which was very time consuming. Overall this is one of my favorite shot and it was so rewarding to see it in the venue!
