As a senior compositor with literally hundreds of visual effects shots for feature films and broadcast television commercials, I have also done a great deal of training for VFX facilities, classes, and workshops around the world. I am now offering a personal workshop for digital artists that would like to take advantage of those years of production experience to advance their own careers in visual effects compositing. This workshop will equip you with the core competencies for professional visual effects compositing – bluescreen compositing, compositing cgi, photorealistic composites, and rotoscoping. Future workshops will offer training on even more topics.

While the workshop is conducted with Shake 4.1, the training emphasis is on technique, which is NOT found in any manual. Expert technique is only gained after years of production experience on hundreds of shots. Once you demonstrate a command of Shake, a premier node-based compositor, any employer will accept that you can master their node-based compositor, even if it is not Shake. This is not true if your experience is only with a layer-based compositor, such as Adobe After Effects.

One-on-One Tutoring

The main feature of this workshop is the one-on-one personal tutoring you get in addition to QuickTime movie tutorials, prepared Shake scripts, and project media. After you turn in each assignment we get together on Skype (voice over Internet) to discuss your work, answer any questions, make suggestions, and offer tips - all specific to your needs. It’s like having a senior VFX compositing instructor at your side.

Tutorials

Shake Scripts

Project Media

One-on-One Tutoring

How It Works

The workshop is designed as an eight week course. Of course, you may go at your own pace. If you want to complete all eight weeks in eight days, so be it. You download each week’s videos, prepared Shake scripts and project media, then go through them at your own pace. They are designed so that you can “play along” with Shake on your own workstation. After viewing the week’s video tutorials there is an “assignment” video that briefs you on the week’s training exercises where you apply what you have learned to the project media that is provided. You then upload your assignment Shake script to my website and we review it together over Skype. Each week’s lesson should take you from three to five hours to complete.

Who Should Take This Workshop

This workshop is intended for digital artists serious about visual effects compositing that are already familiar with Shake. It assumes that you have already completed basic Shake training and are ready to learn how to use it effectively for compositing professional visual effects shots. It is the perfect program for someone starting out in visual effects compositing or moving up from Adobe After Effects.

If you need to learn Shake before taking this workshop, then I have two alternatives to recommend to you. First, you could take my Shake 4.1 Essentials on-line training course available on Lynda.com. If you prefer to own the DVD, the same content is also available on Amazon.com. These two training alternatives provide an incredibly low cost way to advance your visual effects career by learning Shake’s powerful node-based compositing. Apple Shake 4.1 Visual Effects (Mac) can still be purchased on Amazon.com.

Price

The cost is only $500 for the entire one-on-one workshop. You get approximately 7 hours of great tutorial videos, prepared Shake scripts, project media, and a total of four hours of personal one-on-one tutoring. This is an average of a half hour of personal tutoring for each weekly lesson. The only other thing you will need a USB headset and a Skype account. A USB headset can be had for as little as $19.99 and Skype can be downloaded for free.

Satisfaction Guaranteed

If you decide that this workshop is not right for you upon completion of the first week’s tutorials, then I will give you a full refund of all your money. No questions asked.

How to Sign Up

Use the contact button below to let me know you would like to start your personal VFX compositing workshop. I will send you a PayPal invoice for easy online payment and follow up with the download information for the first week’s material. You could be working on advancing your visual effects career tomorrow!

Testimonials

What I like most about your One-on-One Workshop is the personal contact.
Getting led by a very senior visual effects artist is something that no tutorial may achieve.
It's like a secret handshake.

Prof. Eberhard Hasche - Berlin
University of Applied Sciences - Brandenburg
Department of Computer Science an Digital Media

It was very nice and useful talking to you. You have a gift: it is to explain things in a very understandable way, and for a stranger like me it is very useful to hear you talking "clearly". And of course the way you explain it is beautiful, as beautiful as this fascinating subject I want to master. I think I will attend your advanced composite course in Maine, too, so I will be able to meet you there. Thank you again and ciao!

- Valerio Oss
Owner, Pixel Cartoon
Trento, Italy

Valerio did come to the US to attend Steve's Advanced VFX Compositing Workshop
at the first ever visual effects workshops taught at the Maine Media Schools of Photography and Filmmaking.

vfx workshop topics

Here is an overview of the topics covered each week, plus a sneak preview of one of the videos from each week. Just click on the video icons to play. These previews are low resolution, while the actual tutorials are 1024 x 768. The total runtime of the video tutorials for all eight weeks is 6 hours and 48 minutes.

Bluescreen and greenscreen compositing are the bread and butter of digital compositing. Explore Shake’s different keyer technologies by working with Keylight, Primatte, and the ChromaKeyer on a variety of problems to compare results. Learn their strengths and weakness and when to use which. Understand the despill operation and its inherent artifacts.

The sales brochure aside, you can never just plug a bluescreen into the keyer and dial in a professional composite. You invariably must help the keyer by using a number of strategies that include pre-processing the bluescreen and devising clever divide and conquer strategies. Learn the secrets of pulling multiple keys and combining them in your own composite outside of the keyer.

A great deal of the work in digital compositing is to composite CGI (3D animation). The modern digital compositor must know how to work with multi-pass CGI renders as well as multi-plane compositing. Learn why color correcting the CGI elements must be done using the unpremultiplied version even though the CGI is delivered premultiplied.

Whether compositing CGI or bluescreen elements, a key step in a professional digital composite is to color correct the various layers so that they all appear to have been filmed together. Develop a methodical step-by-step procedure to guarantee photorealism in your composites plus the “constant green” method of color adjustment that leaves brightness undisturbed.

Color correcting the layers of a composite is merely the first step towards achieving a convincing composite. All of the other layer attributes must also be convincingly matched which include lens effects, grain and noise matching, depth of field, shadows, edge blending, and light wrap effects.

Rotoscoping is a core skill in digital compositing and indeed may be the first job a new compositor gets. Learn about spline-based rotoscoping, how to choose the appropriate keyframe strategy, articulated rotos, creating motion blur, and how to do a quality inspection of your finished roto to find your mistakes before the boss does.

In every composite you will need to isolate one or more objects with a matte for special treatment – color correction, a blur, you name it. Learn multiple methods of creating a matte designed to fit any situation – lumakey, chromakey, the difference matte, the color difference matte, garbage mattes, and how to “roll your own”. Being able to quickly create a clever matte can save you hours of rotoscoping.

Most digital compositors will be working with video, which brings its own long list of issues to the table. Learn how to de-interlace video (and when you don’t have to!), how to cope with non-square pixels, when and how to perform a 3:2 pullup and how to put it back with a 3:2 pulldown. Learn tips, tricks, and techniques for coping with the 4:2:2 color sampling of video.