George Quelch - VFX

Something I have learnt whilst studying and working is the importance lens and film stock choice affects the overall look and feel of your image, and I think its really important to carry this over into fully digital work, or matching it to backplates. A big part of my learning more about this was my LensFX gizmo . I improved it a lot during the last few months of uni to get it to a place I was really happy with. Adding features to add lens dust and focus breathing. Below is a test I did in Arnold, playing with some displacement, trying to emulate the features/effects of a real lens with focus breathing. I added a focus pull, lens breathing, a lens flare, lens dust, filter flares and subtle glows. To make it feel more cinematic, I worked at 1920*800 widescreen resolution and created anamorphic style bokeh. I think it makes the image feel a lot more dynamic that if it was a simple focus pull, with no breathing or refocusing.  Best to watch this video in fullscreen at 1080p ...

I wrote this script a while ago whilst I was still at University. It was basically to help us reference assets into our shot files. Our structure was: Maya Project  -> Assets -> Props -> PROP NAME FOLDER -> PROP.ma So the script would read all .ma files in the "prop name folders" and give you a list of all the props in the folder, you could then select as many as you needed and reference them all in. Made the whole process a bit more simple, although Maya does have more advanced scene setup tools which would have been more effective in the long run, if we put the time into learning them.