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 Drazen Zeljkovic is a 26 year old guy with a
huge appetite for VFX, the motion graphics industry, and
pizza/barbecue!
He lives in the Croatian capital of
Zagreb. At this time, he is a compositing/motion graphics
freelance artist.
We spoke with Drazen about his work,
his passions, and his latest project, Prljavo kazaliste - Iza
mojih prozora.
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Q. What made you decide to become a VFX
artist? | |
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The decision to become a freelance artist came after years
of working in large and small postproduction studios. While
working at various studios, I became really hungry for more
creative and bigger projects. The type where I can help create
screenplays as well as supervise VFX shootings. So here I am,
free!
Everyone has some kind of dream as to what they
want to be when they grow up, like a policeman, fireman, race
car driver, or something like that. My dream was to become the
guy who makes magic as a CG magician! I was really impressed
with all the commercials and blockbusters that I had seen
growing up, so I told my parents that I needed a little camera
to be able to experiment.
At first, I think my parents
thought something like: "oh no, our son will become some kind
of a geek with a camera". Since then, it has turned into an
obsession to shoot, edit, and post produce all kinds of
footage!
It was a really nice feeling to find out that
my hobby could become my job!
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Q. What artist/event/person inspires
you? | |
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I can say that inspiration is all around us; nice things
as well as bad. There are really talented artists that you
learn about over the Internet and inspirational portals in
your bookmarks that you can look at from time to time. I
cannot name a person that inspires me, it's more like the
whole world is an inspiration!
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| Q. How long have you been
working with Fusion as an artist? Where did you learn
your compositing skills, and how did you first get
started using Fusion?
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I've been using Fusion for about 4 years now!
In
the past, I worked in layer-based software and, as I wanted to
do more complex things, someone introduced me to node-based
compositing. Fusion was my first choice and I decided to take
a Fusion tutorial course series from cmivfx to take my
knowledge to the next level. Unfortunately, there are no vfx
schools in my area!
All that 3D tracking data in a real
3D space with a lot of particles put a smile on my face and
that smile is still here! A lot of practice and some more
learning videos, as well as online schools like fxphd, opened
my eyes!
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| Q. What shows have you
contributed to in the past?
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I was Title Sequence Designer and Compositing Artist for
some television and documentary series, Editor for music
videos for Croatian bands. I was also a director,
postproduction engineer, and compositing artist for major
Croatian companies for their commercials.
All the work
I performed has left me with nice memories and good results;
from working alone to working as part of a team.
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| Q. What are some of your
favourite tools in Fusion?
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I see Fusion as a really powerful compositing and motion
graphics platform, 3D space with displaces, duplicates, real
materials, heavy particles which take you to a whole new level
of thinking, and it has a really nice community that makes
everything easier to understand!
So, every tool is a favourite,
especially ctrl+b!
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| Q. What trends do you see
emerging in visual effects? How do you see the role of
the VFX artist changing, and where do you see yourself
in 10 years?
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Every job is challenging in some way. There's no simple
way to get great results without analyzing footage and
logically approaching all of the tasks. It's good to talk to
other artists and learn some quick cheats for finishing a
task. Every finished task is one step up and there are a huge
number of steps to take your project all the way!
I
see myself traveling around Europe and meeting interesting
people, working on big shows and projects, and feeding myself
with good food and good production results.
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| Music Video: Prljavo
kazaliste - Iza mojih prozora
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Here is a little story about the last project I worked on,
Prljavo kazaliste - Iza mojih prozora:
Full music video:
http://vimeo.com/28329970
Breakdown video:
http://vimeo.com/28231150
Music videos
are not really high budget projects so there was no budget to
hire any 3D artists to help make 3d buildings and real 3D
stuff. The deadline was short as well!
As the only
artist working on the project, I decided to take it all into
Fusion and stylize all the backgrounds, make some camera
projections, and take advantage of Fusion's great 3D space.
The front building is an image that needed some paint
work, it was also done in Fusion. With great tools for cloning
and compositing some other images and textures created the
clean plate of the main building!
Then the simple
geometry was made in 3DSMax, and then projected back into
Fusion, where the reflections, other aspects, and materials
were added.
It was great to have all the materials and
reflection parameters right inside my compositing package. It
gave me great and quick control.
All of the back
plates were rendered as image planes in 3D space, and all of
the plates were composited in Fusion at the end (RAW footage
was given from the RED camera).
A lot of time was
saved due to Fusion's 3d compatibilities, such as particles
and advanced materials, all of the smoke/wind/snow/newspaper
particles were created in Fusion.
Also, I have to
mention that Fusion's community is really strong. I have found
some really cool scripts that I used to make everything
faster. I am talking about the EDL importer for eyeon Fusion,
it helped me with a challenging workflow. I was then able to
import my greenscreen timelines from Adobe Premiere right into
Fusion in a raw RED format. There was no rendering from
Premiere and again importing the compressed footage into
Fusion.
My favourite shot from the video is the
'falling paper shot', which you can see in the breakdown
video, http://vimeo.com/28231150.
The paper was attached to some fishing line and shot
on artificial wind. That was enough to take the shot to a
final.
Particles were emitted from keyed footage of
the paper with an alpha channel, using a few built-in filters,
the stylized fire was created.
In the end, I can say
that this was an interesting project to work on and Fusion
gave me everything I needed to make it work. Of course I
cannot forget about the most important tools, my hands and my
imagination.
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