 How's it going? I'm Sean Kennedy. I'm a visual effects artist and a compositor from Los Angeles, California Little bit of a 3d generalist kind of thing, but I don't really do any one 3d thing great mostly 2d stuff I've worked on a lot of feature films. I think like it's over 50 now something like that TV shows commercials, short films, student films, independent films, everything you can think of that needs visual effects I've dabbled in and and I wasn't I was trying to think when I was trying to think of topics. I was trying to think of something Something relating very specifically to compositing to talk about Because you know obviously Blender is a 3d program and I kind of wanted to do something less 3d which is the compositing angle so I Was trying to think of everybody everybody thinks of compositing and they think of things like you know like the Avengers they think of putting the Hulk running through the city smashing everything or they think of You know Harry Potter on broomsticks or whatever they think of the big grand things that went to Oscars and all that but what what doesn't get a lot of press is Probably about what isn't like 75% of a visual effects artist's daily life and that's cleaning things like fixing things The the things that go wrong on film sets is staggering Things like boom mics dropping into frame That's almost expected nowadays But then there's things like people leaving stuff on tables or they don't get clearance for a logo on something So now that that laptop was in 25 shots in the movie and now we can't use that logo So now we've got to patch the logo on the back of the laptop You know for an hour in the movie. So there's a lot of things like that My first job in visual effects ever But I barely knew anything had no I just knew how to set a key frame in After Effects and I got hired at this place and my it was on Austin Powers Gold member the last Austin Powers movie and My very first job was there's a shot where Where Austin is chasing dr. Evil up a ladder Maybe it's the other way around but Austin falls and he grabs on to dr. Evil's pants and pulls his pants down as he's falling And just the first of many many of my visual effects shots in my career that have dealt with nudity, but I Had to remove a wire. There was he had wires holding him up as he fell off this ladder And my job was just to remove the wire And it wasn't like he was on a green screen or anything. He was in the set the wire was over You know dr. Evil's back is all moving around and wrinkles and you know They're fighting and struggling and then his his butts out. So I've got to patch that So it was it wasn't easy. It wasn't like just taking a quick little painted image and sticking it in there I had to really work at it and not knowing anything it took me ages But anyway, I got it done and that's one of those things that you know that doesn't get written up in articles that kind of stuff So I thought it'd be fun to go through Using blender for that kind of stuff for the the non-glamorous visual effects So just curious just to get an idea how many people use the blender compositor at all. Is there a lot? Yeah, well, it's alright. That's good. Is there anybody that uses it without touching the 3d part with only using yeah Not surprising right on So yeah, so that's that's what you know working in the industry. I tell people as a Compositor I tell people yeah, I use blender and they don't understand it first They still don't understand that blender has a compositor that it can do rotoscoping that it can do tracking and plane tracking and all that stuff so So yeah, I've got a I've got a few I've got a few examples that we can go through Other things that that I've had to do like in my career over the years some of the weirder things has been to Like take weight off people There's a there's a very popular actor who everyone in this room knows I think he's won multiple Academy Awards and I worked on a movie of his or there was a very specific shot And he specifically requested that 20 pounds be taken off So I spent a good three days doing that There's other things like there's like back to nudity. I've done a lot of nudity In in Austin Powers gold member there's a there's a like a rap video that dr. Evil does with mini me and There's a part where there's a girl dancing and you know She like she just dances like across the screen basically from one side to the other and She was wearing a bikini in the shot and they wanted it to look like they wanted me to pixel her out But they didn't want to see any of the bikini. They wanted it to look like she was naked under there So in my head at first I had to remove the bikini and then pixel her out later. So I spent a lot of time Making her look naked. Yeah, which is very interesting. I actually used her belly button and kind of moved it And The boss it was it was fun. The boss came in he didn't think I was gonna go that far came in saw it and was a little shocked I've had to that was creating nudity. I've had to take out nudity. There was a shot in The same movie with the actor who wanted the the weight removed where some girls are lifting up their shirts And they wanted to keep a PG rating. So I had to make sure their shirts didn't go all the way up So that was interesting. So you get all these interesting, you know things like that and there's a and then again Like I said, the lazy people leaving coffee cups crew members Everything you can think of has been left in a set people walking through in the background cables wires all this kind of thing All that stuff has to be that people are just lazy on set anymore. So So, yeah, I thought we could I'd show you just a couple I'd start with some some pretty Really just fell asleep Some pretty This one kind of the same sounds louder to me Just some really basic things I'll start with basic things and then I'll show you some some I mean all this stuff is pretty basic There's nothing crazy here, but just like some examples some techniques where If you do this kind of stuff blenders certainly an option You know it can handle a lot more than I think most people think it can like this is a This is literally the the most basic thing you could do right here is It'll play is this Is that playing alright? Yeah, looks good. There's a ceiling up there and Obviously they didn't finish the set and her head crosses it and this was cropped for more widescreen So I didn't have to patch the whole thing but I did have to patch a little bit of it and It doesn't get any easier than this It's basically just a roto with a solid keller patched in there and then fix put her hair back over top. So very very easy project, but You know, that's the kind of thing that that you know blender can crank through those things in 10 minutes Another one is this kind of thing There's no door handle there. They had it on there for earlier scenes. They've removed it for these and And You know instead of making they put tape over it why just paint it brown instead of just painting it brown like the rest of the door They had that paint. This is on a soundstage. So They end up it'll be easy for him to see and fix if we just paint it green instead of brown so end up having to You know and again, it's it's really it is really easy, but it's I Don't I don't know if it's I hate to I hate to call it lazy, but It's it seems like 10 more minutes on set what it saved, you know An hour or so at home. So But again easy thing track something a couple rotoscopes It's done And I brought these projects, but they're not they're nothing hard. So I don't know if they're worth opening but Then I had some other things I just finished a project. I don't even know if it's been released yet. So I'll show the stuff anyway because it's going to be released very soon. Maybe this maybe nobody from them will see this but We'll just take a look at some of it Like the first thing would be This is a shot. Um, maybe should I not say what this is for? Uh It's for the Nerdist. There's a website called the Nerdist And they hired me to do some visual effects for a parody video. They're doing Um, that I thought was going to be released last week. I don't think it's been released yet So any day now this should be out, but uh, they have this this just quick shot girl with a this supposed to be a bomb and It's just a ball with some styrofoam plugs in it And they so I had to put the light on make a little flashing Um, and something I did in that in that project if I can open that real quick that I think uh, it's interesting Um, I used a it looks a little more complex than it really is backdrop and um Come on work. I did this technique where uh You stabilize the frame do all your work and then reintroduce the motion Um, and it's something uh, it doesn't work for every shot It works for a certain kind of shot like this one that just has either her hand is just moving a little bit Or the camera is just moving a little bit. You can't have much perspective changing when that's happening, but um You can see That uh, if I go to Yeah, all if this is the uh, this is the footage and the node directly after it, which I should uh Move all this junk out of the way Um, the node directly after it is just the stabilized node. I just stabilized off one point Um, I think it was the red dot And uh, it just stabilizes it in the frame and then I can just layer on the little uh, the little red dot I can do some Really blurred masks to do the glow and flicker those Yeah, there's the led light right there, which is tiny I don't even know where it is Yeah Oh, it's a little slow laptops a little slow Um But anyway, uh, that's that was the idea with this one was the the technique of stabilizing something Layering in Uh, your elements that you want to do and then at the very end These are all the glows that I put on And then at the very end I reintroduced that that same track, but I invert it by If you go back here you take the uh The offsets and just reverse them by multiplying by negative one And uh, it inverts that data and you can reapply it as a transform I would suggest always using a transform node if you do want to do this because uh, uh You need to pick uh bilinear. So you get a sub pixel motion If you do nearest you'll get the Full pixel motion and that's not good Um So yeah, so that's that's one technique is the stabilize and then un-stabilize thing and that also works I have a project I can bring up later It works for rotoscoping as well if you're doing a more complex rotoscope you can stabilize do your roto And then you can have less keyframes And then reintroduce the motion at the end again um I have this other shot that is The riddler obviously and he's in a courtroom and they This was a rented set. It's like a freestanding set in los angeles and they needed to have graffiti all over it This is this is uh, uh, I don't think this is the finished one. I think this was just a in progress um But this is the kind of thing that a lot of people would see and and say, you know We're gonna need a 3d track blah blah blah, but you don't you don't need to uh I only 3d track when you absolutely have to um For this one. I just use a lot of plane tracks Essentially all this all these question marks are just going on two planes the back wall and the front of this podium Um, and that's exactly what the uh, wow. I shouldn't have closed that. No silly The uh plane track. Do I have that riddler comp in here? Yeah, so this is the footage And if you go into the motion tracking you can see it's just a whole bunch of plane tracks um Which you know, like I said earlier, that's still one of these things that uh Most people who've heard of blender still don't know it can do plane tracks You know, I've got images going off the frame and everything and it works fine I tracked a million things, but you only need four tracks to do a plane track So I could have done this, you know, if I was in a rush, I could have done this really quickly The more tracks you have of course the more uh, accurate it'll be but uh But you can throw in as many plane tracks as you like and I can you know Then go back and adjust these once I put the image in if it looks warped adjust them super easy Uh, and it looks like a 3d track, but there was no 3d tracking involved. So Very easy cancel that not closing this time. Um, I did this There's a uh, there's a lot like I was talking about the 20 pounds Um, there's a lot of beauty fixes that also happen as well A lot of actresses I think they even work it into their contracts sometime now where they have to Approve how they look in their films and all that kind of stuff So you can see this on the left. She's got a stronger wrinkle under her eye. She's got She's got a little bit more of a wrinkle here. She's got some I mean, this is all normal stuff. This is it's not like this is stuff to be ashamed of but People are you know, the actresses and all that can get a little crazy with how they look and want to look Perfectly smooth and plastic like and all that so um, so yeah on this side that we've softened a little bit of the Some of the wrinkles and all that and kind of taken down this, uh The the dark spot there And again, it's just nothing nothing difficult But something that every compositor if you work in a studio, especially a smaller studio Um, you're going to have to do this kind of stuff Uh, just all the time it seems like And then every once in a while they'll throw you like a tiger from life up high Uh But yeah, this kind of stuff it's all again. It was just all uh Just I did two tracks and then I would just parent I'd make little rotos Parent them to whichever track was closest to what? What I was fixing In the case of the wrinkles I would just softly blur it I would blur the mask as well because you don't want any hard edges on a mask You would also reintroduce the film grain Every every camera has its own kind of film grain even all the digital stuff because they want it to A lot of times it's just to emulate film so they'll have You know certain film camera or digital cameras will have an inherent grain but uh Yeah, so you reintroduce that kind of stuff uh for the for blending out the the uh that darker spot All I did was track in a uh a solid color. I just made another roto put in a solid color And uh, and that was it for that. Uh, let's see work. This'll work Uh, yeah, so if I turn off these ones No, no, no, no, no this way If I turn off those you can see all that stuff come back if I turn them back on They all go away So it's it's small stuff like that, but it's it's uh important to them. So Uh That kind of stuff what else do I have I have um, oh, I brought some uh Oh, I have that thing. I can show that thing. I've made some node groups to help me out with things Um, they're nothing complex. They're nothing It's not like I'm writing tools from scratch or anything. I'm just Creating some really simple node groups that just help me with things I do all the time Um, and there's a there's a technique for color correcting Uh, I don't know who invented it, but I learned it from a from a guy named mark christensen Who's a x industrial light magic guy and he's written a bunch of books for after effects called studio techniques And he gives a technique in there where you look at each channel Each color channel if you're putting two images together you look at each one And you match the brights and the darks And if you go through each channel and do that when you go back to the full color channels They're usually in the ballpark. So you've kind of matched them Uh, and when I was first learning that I thought that's ridiculous That doesn't make any sense, but then you do it and you look at it and it makes perfect sense And it it works so well Um, so I kind of made uh, I actually had sergue's help on this This was like two years ago two and a half years ago. I think I put this together Uh, and I needed some help with Controlling I was trying to use the curves node I was and I couldn't link some of the aspects of the curves node to a group node input And uh sergue knows how to do it all with math nodes. So he set that up for me Um, but let me show you what that does Uh, this uh, I did this green screen For this Uh, but please disregard this is like a two minute green screen I just wanted to get the green gone for the sake of the color correction thing But this is another girl from the the Nerdist video If I turn all these off make sure these are off, right? Yeah um Yeah, so you can see like the background here is very green very blue And she's still the colors that they shot on the uh, she has she has a green screen. Let me show you the plate actually Uh, there it is plate right there. So she's got blue and green screen um Rotate her out I do a little You can see I mean zoom in on her edges a little bit I did I tried to do a quick little five minute little edge fix a little but It didn't it only helped slightly it wasn't that great, but uh See I didn't spend too much time on the on the key here But let me show you the color correction stuff, which is pretty cool. Um, so I called it I called my node christianson cd cc christianson color correct Just because I linked this technique to him uh in my head. So I always know what it is. Um But basically Let me go here a little faster if I turn this one on This is how uh This is how it just comes in by default reds reds and blacks Or uh blacks and whites for the red blacks and whites for the green blacks and whites for the blue blacks are zero reds are at one Nothing's different But if I look at the red channel and then I start you can see how different it is right and you can start to dial it in um Like she she just looks completely too bright to be in this scene I don't know if I can the blacks are maybe in the ballpark. I guess but uh, she's just way too bright. So I would take down The the brights a little bit just by lowering that red because we're looking at the red channel I would lower that a little bit Um, and I kind of already set this up just to make I didn't know how much time I would have if I'd Even time to work through this, but I'm going to try But I set it up so I'd have the numbers already ready to go but uh Then if we switch, uh, this is more in the ballpark like if you look at the the brights up here They kind of now match You know the grays and all that they kind of in the ballpark more of her skin So we can go to the green channel take a look Um, the whites are looking pretty good. The whites could this is a little blown out compared to her So we would maybe turn that up a little bit like 1.3 um She should get a lot brighter And the blacks probably close we can maybe Uh, lift them a little tiny bit. I guess like what do I have done there? Oh for Something like that. So really tiny amounts Uh, yeah, it's very subtle, but uh, you know that kind of stuff that kind of stuff counts and then Go to the blue channel see how that looks blacks are way off whites are way off. This is really blown out. So you go 1.4 and then the uh The blacks because she's in the foreground, you'd always want to keep the blacks A little bit stronger with things in the foreground and in the background But uh, you can still probably come up a little bit. So if I was to go 0.03 um And then when we go back to the full keller comp, she fits in that world much better now Um, so five was to turn that off. You can see what she looked like before She looks way too red now But uh, this definitely gets her more in the ballpark And then you can still do you know contrast things over top of this with another keller correction But that's a great technique and I want to I use that technique a lot in other programs And I really wanted to have it set up in blender. So I I did that um Well surrogate did the hard part. I made the group um And then I I talked to a few people on a mailing list about it and another guy suggested to just throw in link these two keller swatches So I made yet another version of it where It's literally just two color swatches and you can you can kind of in let me see if I can figure out I can move things around. There we go. Look at that in there um These color swatches I can literally just drag it around and you know make her whatever color Whatever kind of color you want um So it's it's the same exact thing just a slightly easier interface and I would I I use this The numerical one when I have to be much more accurate But when I just have to get it in the ballpark quickly. That's when I'll go to this one with the swatches Um, but that's been a very useful tool for me. Uh, I've spent I've been using blender now as my main compositor Well 50 50 composite compositor, uh For maybe three years now two and a half three years. So, uh, so I've been trying to Make my workflow as easy as I possibly could um What else do I have I have uh No, I have a whole bunch of node groups. I can show you uh, I didn't talk about at least a few of the ones I've built um These are some of them. Um, I've got clamps. I've got different kinds of clamps Uh, clamping is really important when you're dealing with black levels in compositing If you ever if you ever watched, um A movie that you saw in the theater and then it comes out on tv and it always looks different on tv or things like Maybe in the theater the compositing looked great and they were on a green screen in their car But you couldn't tell in the theater and then at home you're like, ah, it looks horrible It's usually because of black levels, uh, because black levels will translate very differently in film space and in tv color space um, so black levels are very important and I've got a A couple tools these I've got a value clamp. I've got an individual rgb clamp. I've got a Very specific black node where I can tint the blacks of anything um With a certain threshold and all that and I can tint them any color like if the blacks in the background are more red Ish and the ones in the foreground are bluish. I can tint the foreground ones to match the background ones Uh, that kind of stuff. Uh, I've got a light wrap which is essential in any compositing um, which is bringing the the uh, the background kind of over The edges of the foreground you kind of blur the background and then bring it over and it's it's a it's very easy to set up manually But if you're doing that every day it gets old so it's easy just to have a node that does it Just plug a couple things in you got your mount I also cheat a lot a lot of people light wrap is originally designed for wrapping bright lights around a foreground object Uh, but I cheat a lot sometimes and I'll I'll change it Uh to bring that bright stuff over you would set it to a plus or a screen multiply mode in the uh You can see here. I'm using an ad which is a plus. Um, I'm using that by default in my node group But sometimes I'll just switch it to mix and I'll still keep the background blurred and I'll Mix the background over the edges just to help blend it in a little bit And I'll turn it way down if I do something like that, but that helps In compositing a lot as well I've got a chromatic aberration node that I got it set up I got this 2d parent one, which I will show you in a moment Um, it's unsharp mask if you've ever used photoshop. I'm sure you've sharpened something with the unsharp mask I've got that uh film grain Things like that, uh So nothing nothing complex just things I was doing every single day that I needed I needed to get done quicker um, what else can I can show you the uh Yeah, like a lot of people still don't know blender can rotoscope. I brought rotoscoping examples Uh, I've got this one I can show you super quickly Here, which is just a car I believe it's just a car in an alley nothing fancy The footage I just walked by it kind of just pans across it and to rotoscope that quickly I just did two tracks on it And uh again stabilized the footage did my roto Uh, look at the roto. I rotoed on the stabilized footage, which was very easy Uh, and then at the do all my color correction whatever I want to do in this case I think I was just desaturating and contrasting everything except for the car And then uh, and then put the motion back into the footage again Uh, just to speed up rotoing and what I could have also done is use those same exact tracks That I have in here just two of them. I could have all well, I couldn't have done it with two I would have needed four, but I could have made a plane track Parent that roto to the plane track and accomplish the same thing just as quickly um, you know with minimal keyframes Um This 2d parent example is interesting. I think I can uh, do I have enough time? Yeah, I guess so quickly New I can run through this super quick Um, a lot of times, uh, in fact every day in compositing Uh, you're matching you take something and you're putting it into a plate that already exists Um, if you're doing things like wire removals rig removals patching stuff, you know somebody left Uh, something sitting in the set or you want to take out a boom mic or anything if you're removing anything say you want to remove birds You had lots of birds in your scene that you put in two years ago when I did that talk You can now remove them with just uh, you know tracking the birds putting little patches over them whatever But you're always putting something into a moving plate And uh, and to do that you've got to track and then you've got to get that tracked data onto your the image If you're using a still image you want to track that in And I earlier I showed you you you can reverse the the tracking data by multiplying it by negative one And it gets a little tiring putting in all these negative one multiply nodes and stuff. Uh, so I kind of built a um A node that that does that a little quicker Uh, and I can show you how it works. It's it's really simple if I can find my footage I've got this footage right here um We go set scene frames prefetch Should load quick right it's all working Go there I'm just gonna I'm just gonna track two points so we can do this really quick hopefully Uh, close that track That tracked lock it Over here somewhere find another one That looks great. Please track awesome Um, so I've got these two tracks look great. Um So now if I wanted to put something, you know in the sky or whatever or into the plate in any way Uh I would have to go down here to the stabilizing settings to be able to access these in the compositor You have to uh, let's do this use nodes get rid of this Bring in the movie clip Um I didn't set this one's super easy so I didn't bother setting it up beforehand. Uh, it's pretty quick viewer node Change the frame and you can see it There we go To access these the movie clip node comes in with all these Offset scale angle and all that But as far as I know to the only way to access those is to use this 2d stabilization panel here So if I select this left one and I turn on 2d stabilization, I add that left one in Uh, I can then go down to rotation Select the right one add that one in so now it's going to take this data and move it into that compositing node The movie clip one And me and me and Sergei still have to talk about the scale Where the stabilized scale button is But we're going to get to that So yeah, so now now there's data coming out of these And normally I like I said I'd have to do that multiply by negative one Bring in a transform node all that kind of stuff But here I'm just going to I'm going to grab my image from here to the parent example. I've got a nice moon picture This moon has nice rings And if I bring in Oh, yeah, okay if I bring Shift f1 if I go here go to my node groups. I'm going to grab my little 2d parent helper node Which is just all that stuff already built Oh, come on one minute one minute. There we go. Don't want it there want it Uh there So the only reason I'm putting the background node Uh into this inside of this node is because it's it kind of I'm using the background node to sort of set up a canvas Blender's compositor does not have a canvas. So if you bring in an image Uh where the image goes right to the boundaries of the image and you want to blur it It won't blur it outside of the boundaries of that image Um, you have to you have to somehow tell it it's a bigger image So I cheat that by putting it over the background node And it lets me it lets me kind of It kind of makes the boundaries of my image the project size the 1920 by 1080 It's just a cheat. It doesn't work in every instance, but but now I've If I plug these in offset x offset y if I plug them into the correct things and the angle Now All that tracking data has been moved to that that image. So if I put This over top of it That put that over top add or screen I guess would be better So now everywhere I go in the in the timeline that planet is just going to move right along with the footage It's going to take all that tracking data and just apply it to that still frame So it's essentially tracked in rotation and all that stuff Um And I I do that a lot so I this helped out a very lot I could just track two points drop this node in hook up three wires and it was done Um, and I've got other things in here where I can shift it if I want I can do whatever 500 Probably a little too high Maybe like 250 something like that I can scale it up a bit if I want And it still keeps all that uh all that tracking data perfectly aligned in there. So um, so that's some of the stuff that uh That's some of the things I've been using blender for as a composer You know using it in place of other 2d only programs and it's uh And that's the kind of stuff I just wanted to show so I thought it'd be I thought it'd be something different rather than everybody knows blender can do really good at putting a 3d thing into a live action plate. So So, yeah Yeah, yeah, I'll be I'm here all weekend No problem. Am I just unplugging this? Sorry? Just unplugging right? Yeah, okay