In Part 1 of this post I wrote about how to get in to animation.
In Part 3 I wrote about the 3D disciplines in VFX.

In this post I will quickly explain what Visual Effects are and then focus on the 2D aspect of VFX.

Visual Effects

Before we start, we need to distinguish between Visual Effects and Special Effects, since these terms get often confused.
Special effects are all the real life effects that are happening on set during shooting including explosions/fire, water/rain, wind, make up, in camera effects, wire-rigs and many more. With the term Visual-Effects we refer to everything that is done in post-production usually using CGI (Computer Generated Imagery).

In this post I will focus on Visual Effects.

2D or 3D?

The first question you have to ask yourself is: Am I planning to become a 2D artist or a 3D artist? These are the two main categories in VFX and they have many sub-categories each. I try to point out most of them, but some departments are named differently in some companies and maybe they do a bit more or a bit less of what I am describing here. It depends on how the pipeline is set up in each company. Also I try to explain the very basic tasks that these departments need to do, otherwise I would need to write a book to cover everything in depth.

In 2D the first that come to mind would be:

• Story-Board Artists
• Concept Artists
• Texturing Artists
• Digital Matte Painting Artist
• Roto/Paint Artist
• Digital Compositing Artists
• DI

Story-Board Artist
Usually they are active in pre-production before the shooting even starts. Their job is to draw clear images for every shot in the movie and resolve sequences so that they work in the cut. They work really closely with the director. The drawings usually have a sketch quality but the aim here is clarity of what is happening in every frame and not creating a master piece for every drawing. Camera movements or zoom information are also included in these Story-Boards. That way everybody has already a clearer idea what to shoot on set.

A powerful extension of Story-Boards are Animatics. Basically all the sketches are digitized and cut together like the shots that would end up in the movie. By doing so you can experiment with the cut, how long shots should be and test in a rough way if certain camera moves can work out.
In fact in animation movies Story-Boarding and Animatics are essential. Companies like Pixar sketch out the whole movie, shot by shot and have regular meetings with the team to analyse if the current story-line and cut are working. And before any shots even get started to be animated they will have a master Animatic that represents the whole movies in Story-Board images. If you happen to have a Wall-E Blu-Ray or DVD at home check out the extras, there should be an alternative cut of the movie visualized as an Animatic that included a different villain at an early stage of the story development.

(Example of how story-board images are used to create an Animatic. This was already a very elaborate animatic.)

Concept Artist 
Concept artists can work in pre and post-production. The main goal here is to create images that describe the mood and colour-palette of the movie for each sequence. As a concept artist you also develop the look of the characters and of the main props of the movie. Concept art can be very powerful to sell an Idea to the client or to have quick image to look at to drive discussions of the movie aesthetics. Once some key images where selected it usually remains the main visual reference for the whole project.

(Godzilla concept art from Kan Muftic.)

Texturting Artist
As a Texturing artist you are responsible for the color and textural appearance of every single object that needs to be created digitally in post production. It is a combination of using photographs and painting manually structures to create convincing textures that once applied to the 3D-model will result in a convincing material. Therefore the texturing department works very close with the 3D-deparments because their work influences each other.

(Very basic texturing process. The 3D Model gets flattened out in different section so that the 3D Spacial information can be represtented in a 2D space. Then you can colorize these areas and wrap the colour information around the 3D model)

Digital Matte Painting Artist
Digital Matte Painting is the digital version of a traditional Matte Painting artist, but instead of painting on glass they use a digital canvas. The main goal of a DMP artist is to create beautiful landscapes and set-extensions. It combines pieces of real photography with digital-painting to create a final image. A mix of pure 2D techniques is combined with some 3D techniques to create 2.5D images that allows to move a camera inside the Matte Painting. By doing so one matte-painting can be used for multiple shots and shared between different artists.

(Random Matte-Painting show-reel I found on Youtube that illustrates how Matte-Paintings are put together)

Roto/Paint Artist
The Roto/Paint artist has two main areas to cover. Firstly he is responsible for removing objects/people/tracking-marker that are not meant to be seen in the final shot. To do so he tries to use still frames of the photography where the area behind that object/person is not covered, and then tries to reconstruct that particular area completely. Secondly he provide mattes that allow it to extract objects/people out of the live-action footage so that it is possible later, when the shot moves to the compositing department, that additional elements can be nested between the extracted element, the live action footage and the CG. To do so it is necessary to trace the silhouette of those objects frame by frame in a process called Rotoscoping.

Digital Compositing Artist
As a digital compositor you take all the generated CG elements and combine then with the live-action-footage in a seamless way, creating the illusion that all these elements where standing in front of the camera while shooting. To do so all the elements need to be color balanced to work with the plate and the other CG elements. It is very common to do some 2.5D re-lighting on the CG elements and adding additional 2D elements like fire/dust/atmos to enhance the look of the scene and blend the line between live-action and CG. These additional elements will be integrated using colour-corrections/2D tracking/3D Tracking. Advanced compositing software, like Nuke from Foundry, allows the compositing artist also to adopt some 3D workflows like 3D-Projections, 3D-Relighting of existing CG-elements, basic particle simulations, basic Shader creation for 3D Objects, basic 3D-modeling and 3D rendering directly inside the compositing software. The final over all look of the shot is also locked with the final composite.

Roto/Paint and Compositing can be two complete different departments but also could be merged into one. Usually in smaller companies the compositing artist would also do the roto/paint tasks for all the shots that he is responsible for. In bigger companies usually these tasks are separate to be able to create as much output as possible in the minimum amount of time.

(This video explains pretty good what Roto/Paint and Compositing artist do.)

DI
DI stands for Digital Intermediate. Usually the DI process will not be done by the VFX facility who creates the Visual Effects work. To keep it short, in DI the whole movie is getting colour corrected and re-balanced so that there are no jumps between shots in a sequence. They also create the colour palette of the movie that will define the over all look.

Since this post is getting very long again, I will cover the 3D side of VFX in Part 3 of this post!

In Part 1 of this post I wrote about how to get in to animation.
In Part 3 you can read about the 3D disciplines in VFX.

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