We recently had the opportunity to sit down with a starting multimedia student. You see, a short interview with a person in the industry was an admissions requirement for her multimedia program.

Yeah, it was flattering. But we didn’t let it go to our heads too much. 🙂

However, the closing interview question started a discussion that we felt should be shared with our readers here on Posermocap.com. It was an inocuous enough question–“do you have any closing advice or comments?” but it opened up two interesting threads.

The first suggestion that we gave was never to look at doing a project all in one program. We’ve used Adobe’s After Effects for compositing for a dozen years now, and it’s become such a part of our workflow that it’s tough to imagine doing even a single animation without it. The control that compositing provides over final image quality is far, far more powerful than trying to do everything in a shot “in camera.”

Compositing is simply combining images or footage and it’s based on the concept that the final footage is two-dimensional. With a two-dimensional image, we can layer images on top of each other using Adobe After Effects or another compositing program (Shake, Fusion, Jashaka) and handle each layer separately. Each layer can have its own effects, animation, colour correction, timing adjustments, etc. Compositing allows tremendous flexibility in handling the final footage.

At its basic level, you could render out the background as a separate layer or pass, each character as a separate layer, and any special effects as yet another separate layer. At a more advanced level, you can render out different buffers for each layer separately – colour, diffuse, specular, transparency, and so forth, and do a custom mix of each buffer to give you ultimate control over the final composite.

You can extend the advice of never doing a project all in one program even beyond the scope of compositing. You can also work out different elements of a shot in different programs. It’s not unusual for Poser and Daz|Studio artists to use programs like Vue and Bryce to create natural-looking backdrops for their characters, but there’s no reason to stop there. You can also use a 3D animation program like Lightwave or 3DS Max or Maya to create 3D elements as needed. As long as you can match camera data, you can even create seamless moving camera shots that no-one would ever know were created in several different programs.

Even though you may be working in 3D, your final footage will be 2D – so take advantage of that.

The second suggestion was to always try to work with other people. Not only will they provide a useful set of eyes to provide constructive criticism, but they will also be able to bring their own talents to the mix and allow you to finish your project faster. Their strengths may allow you to avoid the roadblocks that would stop your project dead in its tracks because you, as an artist, have different strengths. If you have expertise in character animation, but no skill in modelling, how much faster would your project get done if you were able to have a collaborator who could build the models you needed rather than having your project bog down while you were working on modeling rather than character animation?

Doing it all by yourself is great if you have a small project, but if you have larger projects, then a team is a great way to really accelerate production and get your project done.

Any thoughts?