I participated in a program called VFX compositing. It was run by CEE (Careers Education Empowerment) for young black professionals between the ages 18-30. They are a charity that focuses on the economic and social barriers affecting black youth.
The program ran for 6 months. It was every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday for 3 hours each. You don’t receive any grades or marks for it, however; the prof is always there to help you. The goal at the end of the program is to have a show reel, which you can present to studios and hopefully get hired. It is somewhat taxing, as it required about 2 hours every day and a lot more at the end, in order to get your reel looking really good. Fortunately, the course was free so we didn’t have to spend a dime. In fact, even the laptops were provided by CEE to ensure that we could do the course. The software that we used was called Nuke which is the industry standard. Unfortunately, the software is expensive so it is hard to learn by yourself but we were fortunate that the CEE offered it for free. There was a bit of a learning curve. It was similar but also very different from the adobe programs like Photoshop and after effects. I enjoyed the program and loved learning cool ways to bring life into shots. It is fun to introduce other CGI effects into other environments. There was as previously mentioned, a learning curve and it required a lot of effort to really learn how to use the software. The program had to be virtual because of the current pandemic restrictions. It was difficult for me to adjust as I get stressed out when working from home. However, we had a good supporting cast from the program, caseworkers that we could call and discuss the stress that we were feeling from the program. I was able to find time and different work environments at home, so that I could be productive and excel. |
"The goal at the end of the program is to have a show reel, which you can present to studios and hopefully get hired." I would greatly recommend the program especially if you want a job in the movie industry. It is one of the easier paths there. It offers decent paying careers. You could also get your name to be in the end credit as one of the VFX creators for movies.
For this industry, your show reel is a little bit like your resume. My reel consists of various skills that I would like to display to potential studios where I may want to work. These include cleanups like in the first shot of the island, and green screen keying. An example of this is the girl with the hair, and removing the green screen. This was probably the easier thing to do. Another thing I learned was tracking. Tracking is where you may want to replace signs, and you have to track the original signs. Finally roto, which is short for Rotoscoping. This was the hardest and most time consuming of all. You can see this in the last shot with Michael Jackson. I had to cut MJ out of the original shot and replace the background. This was the hardest and longest but, in the end, I got it done and it is one of my favorites. Overall, I’m really proud of what I did and was able to accomplish and hopefully I can take this to the next level. By: Vincent K. Check out Vincent's VFX reel below! |