Bejoy Arputharaj is a passionate visual
effects artist and digital compositor who has a great eye for
detail. He specializes in compositing for film and television
and is presently a freelance artist in India.
We spoke
with Bejoy about being a VFX artist in India, working on the
film AO, and why Fusion is his software of choice - which
makes us, here at eyeon, very pleased!
Here's what
Bejoy had to say...
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Following are some still images and the
description of several shots, for the movie, AO, which
I worked on when I was with Prime Focus Ltd. I
was the Lead Compositor and Tec Supervisor for the
project. We completed 1800 vfx shots within a very
crucial deadline.
Fusion was the one and only
compositing software we used. Without it, we could never
have met the deadline.
As we did not have time to
render most of our 3d outputs and lighting kickbacks, we
used a lot of projection inside Fusion's excellent 3d space.
This is where we did our relighting and renders.
Also,
Fusion's particle system helped us complete many effects
without depending on the 3d team. I believe no other
compositing software has this kind of powerful particle system
built in.
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The following shot is one of my favorites. I started
the shot with the finalized matte painting and roto
mattes in my hand. I had just four days to complete
the task.
It seemed impossible to everyone that I
could finish it on time. But the belief in me and Fusion's
powerful tools moved me on. I came up with the solution to
project the matte painting.
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I assembled the trees and huts in the correct
distance with the tracked camera data. Also, the point clouds
with which I could find exact position of the huts and trees
in Z depth.
Later, I used 3d image planes to
position the trees and huts in Z and even did some animation
cheating for the walking tribals in the front. A complete
walk cycle was missing in the source footage. I imported FBX
mesh of the roughly modeled hill into Fusion's 3d space and
did the projection.
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I did some color correction and added mist with Z
pass rendered out with a 3d render node in Fusion
and some particle effects as well. Bingo! Mission
accomplished on time...
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Here is another sequence which was very challenging.
We had to create hundreds of snakes and match to the live
plates, unfortunately we didn't have the camera details
or lighting reference and again Fusion came to the
rescue. Dealing with a large number of snake passes
was done in a short matter of time and a lot of relighting was
also done in the compositing stage.
This
particular shot had the challenge of matching depth of field
which keeps on changing throughout the shot. It turned out to
be a big challenge.
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In this particular shot, a snake was to be
coiled around this man's body. The interaction with
the clothes was the challenge and was easily achieved with the
Grid Warp tool, which always turned out to be my favorite in
critical situations.
I did some manual animation on
the cloth with grid warp to give the tightness of the coil and
make it look as if it was real.
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AO was a complete fantasy movie and the director wanted a
lot of set extensions and particle effects to be done. We
carried out all the set extensions inside Fusion's 3d space by
projecting the matte paintings and importing FBX inside.
Fusion's 3d Particle system is my all time
favorite! It gave me a lot of power and I prefer not to
depend on the 3d team for all my needs and tweaking.
I worked with particles for Dust, Fire, Spark, Crowd,
and a LOT of simulations. I presented the director
with the previz to a battle sequence done completely inside
Fusion's particle system.
I'm a great fan of Fusion
and will always be...
Right now I'm working on a
project which I can not reveal at present. I use a lot of
Fusion's new tools and thank Fusion 6 for giving me even more
power. Now I can control textures and shaders too.. The
improved particle system gives me so much power.
I know Fusion will come up with even more
new techniques and tools to give me even more power and
fun in comping....
Visit Bejoy's website, Phantom
FX, here.
See more of Bejoy's work
on Vimeo here. |
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