Compositing Reel — 2023

This reel highlights my compositing work as of Spring 2023, largely covering my past 4 1/2 years with Zoic, with a little personal project at the end. Everything showcased was composited in Nuke, and any roto I did myself utilized Silhouette. Please see a detailed shot list below.

Featured Projects

Shot List

Camera Projection

For All Mankind - Season 3 | Zoic

That’s the original plate framing around 0:17 of my reel. Layout handed us an augmented camera move that started way up high. The projection itself was straightforward; the real work was blending the plate into the CG environment, which came down to a mix of matte painting and my own paint in Nuke. The astronauts’ shadows also needed extending, so I had lighting render a cast shadow pass off the roughly-tracked digital doubles — that gave me the natural motion and placement, with a little extra roto to marry it to the plate shadows.
Green Screen

For All Mankind - Season 3 | Zoic

The initial visor lookdev shot — I built the look per episode and handed Nuke setups off to the team. It was also the most complex for layering: roto passes to hold out the helmet edges, plus a stack more for the layered characters. Matching the plate ground to the CG ground was the tough part, projecting paint work that was half matte painting, half my own. Screen-left blends set rocks with Unreal Engine rocks, hopefully seamlessly ;)
Green Screen

For All Mankind - Season 3 | Zoic

Another hefty visor shot. Since I’d started visor and environment lookdev on so many of episode 6’s openers, these were left to me to final. Keying was the challenge — a very dark green screen with hot suit highlights blooming against it, comped onto bright Mars skies, which left stubborn dark edges around the suit details. Lola Akinwusi helped with that meticulous work, here and on many others. The foreground rocks were V-Ray renders from our lighting team, and their AOVs made matching them to the plate hill far easier than the Unreal backgrounds.
Green Screen

For All Mankind - Season 3 | Zoic

Picked for the teaser trailer, so it had to hit near-final long before the rest of the episode. I sat in on client calls and worked with our comp and CG supes to balance the environment to notes, mixing several Unreal Engine variations and controlling atmospherics with depth passes. Lacking traditional AOVs, we treated the environment renders like plate photography — projected garbage mattes and keys to isolate and tweak shadows and highlights. Those depth passes were a huge bonus, and we leaned on them all over the show.
Roto + CG Environment

Lucy in the Sky | Zoic

An augmented camera meant stabilizing and re-projecting Natalie and the divers. I also built a pocket of bubbles for the camera to move through, placing photographed elements on cards.
Roto + CG Environment

Lucy in the Sky | Zoic

Natalie and the divers were on wires against grey screen, then roto’d. The CG got heavy comp treatment to define the look — haze off the depth pass, caustics, pools of light. Bubbles throughout were a mix of FX and stock, carefully matched to each other.
Roto + CG Environment

Lucy in the Sky | Zoic

One of several shots I handled, including tracking the red-vs-green LED continuity across the sequence. A lot of these drill shots had the live action flipped, so I’d reverse the lettering on the drill and, in this case, the rotation of the bit itself. Lining the practical hole up with the CG one was the key challenge on these close-ups.
Split Comp

Lucy in the Sky | Zoic

I first delivered this for the trailer back in late 2018; for the final film I had to comp two takes together. The water filling the helmet was practical, but we had an alternate take where Natalie spoke without any water — so I took her mouth, nose to chin, and integrated it into the practical waterline. Then added extra bubbles streaming in, plus the NBL environment and visor reflection.
Blue Screen

1923 | Zoic

The exteriors were a Nuke skydome with CG water and a ghost ship. The comp challenge was adding window grime: projection wasn’t an option, since layout’s window geo already had the tugboat’s animation baked in, so the original camera would’ve let the windows drift out of frame. With no time to untangle that, we applied the grime via UVs and adjusted per shot to keep the right grime on the right windows. The team worked hard to hold continuity across all our shots. I also animated the hanging pieces to swing — painting them out, stabilizing, animating the swing off reference from other shots, then re-applying the track. Tried-and-true fixes, and a satisfying little one to slot the shot into the sequence.
Blue Screen

1923 | Zoic

Same toolkit as the previous shot, though the gear was actually swinging this time. As the ship passed on the right I built shadowing across its interior, and used the water’s overscan to my advantage, translating it across frame to sell our hero steering out of the way.
Full CG

1923 | Zoic

Our hero didn’t avoid the collision. This took significant comp work to push the color and lighting into our early-dawn look, plus a wet sheen on the ghost ship’s waterline. The splashing water came from Dynamics passes that got broad color work for highlights and shadows, with extra diffusion to suggest finer mist.
Blue Screen / Set Extension

1923 | Zoic

I was comp supervisor on this episode (1.10), but ended up doing the lookdev and final comp on this shot myself. The boat’s size and layout kept changing right up to the 11th hour, leaving comp almost no time for this 5-shot sequence. The Sunday night before our Monday delivery, once I finally had the pieces, I made broad moves — grading the dock and people down until they read against the ship, and using that tunneling effect to justify a bright source at the end, diffusing the sky against the ship and buildings. It was exactly what the client wanted the next morning, so I set the compers loose on the rest with my guidelines and we delivered that day, with only small notes after. One recurring headache: the blue screen sat on a freely-floating barge, so once layout tracked it onto the much-longer ship, the barge’s motion got amplified and the ship’s ends slid against the background. I retracked the ship ends and the background on each shot and locked them together with SplineWarp pins, which saved layout a lot of grief.
Green Screen

Mrs. Davis | Zoic

The actress was on wires but needed to descend with the platform, which layout and anim handled. I brought in the animated geo from her digital helmet and matched a card to it (using Nuke’s match-axis tool). The environment got heavy comp treatment, including custom volume rays on cards for depth. The hose and platform were CG too, with a little Z-slicing in Nuke to seat her inside the platform.
Green Screen

Mrs. Davis | Zoic

Again on wires, but we needed extra “floatiness” — anim handled that, and I projected the plate onto a match-animated card. The suit lights were practical, but I added sources behind her for more realistic glows, since she’d be lighting her surroundings even when a light was hidden from camera.
Green Screen

Mrs. Davis | Zoic

Once more a subtle projection to adjust her motion through the shot, with the whale rising from the depths built in comp off the depth pass. Two parts were especially tricky: The volume rays from her neck were a puzzle. I used the PObject pass from her helmet render to isolate mattes roughly where her practical LEDs sat, matched the luminance to the real lights, and tracked the ray sources from below. The other was her helmet — plugs inside and outside it, a headrest behind the glass, and goop on the outside, all through a 180-degree turn. That made for a challenging layering task, and several pieces needed added shadowing to sit properly against her suit and the scene.
Set Extension

The Right Stuff | Zoic

This had a life-size stand-in for the Mercury-Redstone 3 rocket. The base fins were accurate, so I kept those and replaced everything above, with CG scaffolding integrated into the practical smoke. For the tail of the shot I pulled historical footage and photos to match the spotlights and how the rocket, scaffolding, and lights actually looked the morning of the launch.
Multi-Pass Comp

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 | Digital Domain

I took on most of this sequence and helped define the look from concept art. A few guns had collision issues that were too late to fix in the assets, so I tracked paint fixes onto the backgrounds — quick to turn around since the scenes were fully 3D and I had cameras and depth to lay cards against.
Multi-Pass Comp

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 | Digital Domain

I enjoyed sinking my teeth into character shots longer than the ones I did for the announcement trailer. Learned a lot about eyes here, using a setup originally built for Thanos that we adapted for our show.
Creature Comp

Legends of Tomorrow | Zoic

I wanted this one on my reel mostly because this guy is just so darn cute. The tricky part was layering his tentacles around the guy’s fingers — especially the one wrapping the thumb as his face leans on it. I mixed holdout and non-holdout versions as needed, with some SplineWarping for contact and various contact shadows on both the creature and the hand. Otherwise… just look at him :)
Camera Augmentation

Lucy in the Sky | Zoic

The live action only pulled out to settle on the practical window full-frame — it was never meant to be this dramatic a move. Pushing into our augmented camera took brute-force 2D tracking and rebuilding parts of the actor’s torso, arms, and background, plus a fair bit of multipass work on the ISS and shuttle.
Lookdev

For All Mankind - Season 2 | Zoic

I lookdev’d and animated the glass cracking here. Some cracks came from lighting, others were stock elements I mixed in for detail. The refraction used randomized RGB mattes from lighting plus a few of my own roto shapes.
Window Replacement

For All Mankind - Season 2 | Zoic

I comped the surrounding shots too. Facing outward, these windows were replaced with roto since the on-set translight didn’t work for them, and the cosmonaut was comped in and matched to the CG lighting. The window explosion was tricky to read — the bullet brings the glass in for maybe a frame before the pressure loss sucks everything back out. The debris came from dynamics, and I did many comp rounds to balance the blur and grade against the moon surface.
CG Paper Elements

For All Mankind - Season 2 | Zoic

Lots of CG papers flying through the room and out the window. The flashing lights were practical, so I mixed in an alt paper render where needed to match. Some papers were practical too — honestly I can’t remember anymore which were real and which we added.
Translight Paint

For All Mankind - Season 2 | Zoic

More paper! Mostly here for pacing and context, since they fly by. The scene outside the windows is a translight that needed paint work to remove pieces and even out the brightness — this became my specialty, and I touched every season 2 shot with these windows. At the time my Wacom wouldn’t work over the remote connection, so I did all of it with a mouse, much to my VFX supervisor’s glee.
Paint / Glass Cracks

For All Mankind - Season 2 | Zoic

More paper and flashy matching! More paint-outs on the translight, plus glass crack treatment.
Breaking Glass

For All Mankind - Season 2 | Zoic

The room interior was plate; the exterior walls, window frames, breaking glass, and shredding paper are all CG. It took many revision rounds to balance the lighting — the red interior, the paper’s translucency, how the cracks catch light, and the paper transitioning out into exterior sunlight.
Full CG

For All Mankind - Season 2 | Zoic

A fun one that took me back to my full-CG days at Digital Domain. I matched everything to the exterior treatments another vendor was doing, comping many layers of paper and debris onto the ground. The dust kicking up as the digital double lands had its lighting challenges, and since the Dynamics holdouts on him didn’t really work, I built my own shadowing — stenciling out the lighting passes and matching the black levels to the surrounding shadowed regolith.
Environment Destruction

Sisters’ Quarrel | Personal Project

A fun shot all around. My brother and I knew we wanted environment destruction in this duel, and chopping down a real tree practically was the idea from the start. I got a motorized slider and tested it in my apartment — it repeated camera moves well enough for a little forced reconcile in Nuke. Timing was the challenge on the day. We had to get Cyrah cartwheeling clear before the tree came down, so there was some guesswork and a few takes at different timings for safety. Then we chopped the tree, which you can’t time precisely — “it’s gonna go when it’s gonna go,” as my older brother Eric (the lumberjack) put it. That became the main plate, and I slipped the girls’ takes to match, which meant the plates didn’t actually line up at all. I knew it’d be a big roto job regardless, but I had to pin Cyrah’s take to the tree-chop plate so her motion-blurred edges lined up and the ground she interacted with could be tracked in. The clean plate to remove Eric on screen-right needed SplineWarp help too, since the trees had noticeable parallax — which was the whole point of combining takes with a moving camera. I wanted something that’d make the FanFilm community do a double-take and ask, “wait, how did they do that?”