NIGHT FIRE

INTRODUCTION

This compositing project made with Nuke X. It merges some aerial footage with images and 3D models. Let's explain step by step what did I do to achieve the result that I got.

1. CLEAN UP

The first thing that I had to do was to clean up all those horses I didn't want the final composition to have. It was relatively easy to carry out except for the one at the right because of the running action he makes in combination with the pespective change that the camera movement produces. Even that, with a good Camera Tracker and some time, it was succesfully done.

2. ELEMENTS INTEGRATION

The next thing to do was to compose the differents elements. There are 2D and 3D elements here. The 2D elements are the sky, the mountains and the hole castle. Meanwhile, the 3d elements are the catapult, the bonfire and the fireball. This last one was made and animated by myself using Nuke itself.

The problems here were specially two: The first one, the catapult integration because of -again- the perspective change derivated from the camera movement. It was not easy to fit perfect the model. The other difficulty was to animate correctly the fireball chasing the camera movement and being nice to watch (in tempo terms).

3. EFFECTS, COLOR GRADING AND FINAL ILLUMINATION

The last task was to get that night look that I wanted so bad for the project. For me, It was important to have the original idea always in mind. It was important at this point, but also before, when cleaning up, looking for resources, and while I was integrating them.

So, what I did here was to color grade, to add some illumination to help the fireball and bonfire to integrate correctly, and finally, to add some effects like vignetting and fog to get the things correctly integrated.

SALUTATION

This is my first personal composition project with Nuke. Not only an outcome of days working, also a result of months studying and learning composition. I would like to thank to my classmates, also to Lightbox Academy, and specially to my teacher, Manuel Moral, who taught us not only composition techniques, but also some things about life.

If you've come this far, I can only thank you for reading my annotations.