On the twelfth of May, Antoni from the VFX program asked me if I’d like to join him and some of his fellow VFX classmates in a competition that Framestore is running this summer. Essentially, teams of six students create a combined showreel to submit this coming Friday (the fourteenth of May) showcasing the talents of each member of the group as well as our ability to collaborate on a project. The selected teams will be given the opportunity to make a 30-second short film over the summer with mentorship and free online aid from Framestore representatives. It will be treated like a Framestore internship, and thus is tremendously beneficial for breaking into the industry, not to mention the likelihood of placing a role at Framestore itself afterward- according to Schlussel’s presentation earlier this week, about 70% of Framestore interns end up working there afterward.
So within two days, we are working to put together a showreel that displays our individual best work as well as some of our collaborative projects. Me, Antoni, and Gherardo, who are all part of this group, worked on a collaborative project last term, and we are excited to showcase that in this reel, and the other three members- Diana, Giulia, and Jane- also worked together on a collaborative project last term, so we have a great opportunity to show off our ability to create fantastic work as a team.
I’ve volunteered to write the cover letter for the group. In addition to that, of course, I’ve also got to make sure that my individual work is good enough to not only represent me well but benefit the rest of my group members as we present our work. I had a session with Dom this morning to discuss three things- the mocap footage I’ve been collecting and which I should choose for my individual matchimation project (see post regarding that), fixing image plane bugs in Maya, and which of my matchmove work exhibits my skill best.
Dom suggested I use my helicopter shot, or, as we’ve been referring to it, the Dynamic Shot (because the rotating camera is challenging + impressive for a background track), however, he had a few suggestions for ways that I might push the shot to a more competitive final product. For reference, this is what it looked like originally:
Dom pointed out that the flying helicopter actually does not showcase my track well, because we can’t see the camera moving around it, and the rotating camera is the entire point of choosing such difficult footage to track. He suggested that I have the helicopter stationary in the foreground and instead have a couple extra helicopters flying around it in the back. He also mentioned that I should add a shadowmatte to the ground plane to give it extra believability. Here is the shot with these changes:
It looks a lot better! Finally this shot is showreel-ready. For the Framestore competition specifically, we are looking to add a reel breakdown with all of our passes, and so below you’ll find my breakdown for this shot including my playblast, geo wireframe, and final polish.