The Road to Awesomeness - Ryan Lum Compositor Reel 2024

"Is this all you can do?" Not too long ago that pesky voice knocked at my cranium with that frequency asked question. For years I pondered the possibility of a Visual Effects job, but it was a risky play in the face of my plan of getting a "real job" in the Sciences.

But surprise, surprise - getting a Biology major didn't curb that hunger I had to pursue a more artistic career.

So after a lot of thinking, I decided to trek on my Compositing journey in hopes of contributing to the magic of media and movies. Throughout the months of constant learning, I doubted whether I was good enough to make it. But I'm glad I kept pushing because now I can share my story and projects with you! As I continue down this road to make shots more awesome, I can't wait to learn more from other talented artists.

Behind every shot is a unique story of inspiration and obstacles. Drag the sliders below to see my befores and afters for each project!

SCREEN BURN IN

The goal of this shot was transform the world into a Japanese concrete jungle, but I had 3 major problems to tackle first.

First - the story. How do I sell the idea of Japan in this shot with a sprinkle of satirical and dystopian symbolism on the billboard's design? It took multiple iterations before I settled on a Japanese energy drink design. A previous failed design concept can be seen below. 

I made sure that the slogan was intentionally covered by dead pixels in the LED screen to give it that unsettling and ironic twist. I populated the environment with a variety of Japanese brands and logos (can you spot all the Easter eggs?). 🥚👀

Here's my node tree setup for just the billboard design:

Second - tracking the scene. 50% of the billboard's corners are covered and there are no distinct tracking points on it. The billboard even malfunctions and flashes white for a few frames, bleeding different tonal and luminosity values throughout the scene that confused all the trackers I used (pictured below). It took some massaging with a combo of 2D and 3D trackers before I was finally able to lock in the track for the billboard and surrounding buildings. 🌆

Third - matching color and defocus. I observed the surrounding color and defocus properties when I composited the signage and apartment lights. Since there was a white flicker in the billboard, I removed those few frames from the plate. Frame repair was a challenge as it required me to manually reconstruct the glow to create a smooth transition.

For further insight on how I approached these challenges, check out my full VFX Explainer video below!

ACTOR REPLACEMENT | Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad changed my perception of how robust and intricately designed a world could be in a television series. As one of my favorite shows of all time, I wanted to put myself in the criminal underbelly of Breaking Bad's Albuquerque alongside Walter White. 

In the shot I chose, I wanted to replace Jesse Pinkman with myself - but that brought 4 main challenges I had to overcome.

First - shooting the green screen plate. To get Jesse's unique black and red hoodie, I bought and stitched together a couple of articles of clothing I found at a thrift shop. The skull t-shirt was custom printed at a local shop.

Makeup was used to give my face and hair an unkempt and sweaty appearance to match Jesse's terrified look. During filming, we did our best to match the camera perspective, lighting, and timing to the plate. 

Second - recreating motion blurred edges. As Tuco swings his knife 🗡️ in the foreground, most of his heavily defocused shirt sleeve edges are contaminated with Jesse in the background. Since I had to first remove Jesse, recreate the background, and rotoscope back Tuco's arm, I needed to recreate those fine, semi-transparent edges. There was no procedural way to do this - meticulous frame-by-frame painting was needed to recreate the soft defocused beige/brown shirt sleeve (example pictured below). 

Third - matching focus. After keying my green screen plate, I had to apply a defocus to the hero that matched the sharp depth of focus change from the foreground knife to the background characters. However, I had no information about the cameras or lenses used to shoot this scene. Instead, I sampled the bokeh from Tuco's defocused watch and used its properties to drive my defocus animation (pictured below). 

The defocus also carried the surprise of micro jitter and slight translation shifts from the camera's motion. This required me to balance animated keyframes within my Defocus nodes to match this as close as possible. My rack focus animation setup can be seen below. Rotoscoping the foreground and midground elements such as the milk jug also required its own animated keyframes for their defocused edges.

Fourth - matching color and grain. The different color temperature of the plate, materials of my hoodie, and skin color made it challenging for me to match to Jesse. Iterate, iterate, iterate - that's how I got to my end result! I rotoscoped individual portions of my body so I could have full color grading control in different sections.  You can drag the sliders to see a few different mattes I created. 

Also, the specularity of the sweat on my face was too soft, so I manually boosted the highlights to create harsher falloffs that would better match the plate. 2D relighting was also used to shape the lighting on my body. 💡

A challenge I didn't expect was matching the grain pattern. Not only was there grain - but the shot was also heavily compressed, introducing artifacts that complicated the pattern! I had to create and run my 4K green screen element through multiple pipes of "pixel destruction" to try to match the low resolution look in the plate, as seen in my script below. Sometimes in Compositing, having an element be TOO sharp can hurt the outcome!

This shot tested all my fundamental knowledge of compositing and photorealism. The screenshot below shows a chunk of my Nuke script - the rest of my keying/color correction nodes are in a separate precomp because it's all too heavy in one script haha.

After completing a project that felt as massive as Gus Fring's chicken/drug empire, I practically wanted to yell out:

DIGITAL MAKEUP | Terminator: Dark Fate

Some of my favorite childhood memories involved my parents and I sitting in the living room and watching the Terminator movies. To test my skills, I wanted to digitally manipulate one of the most recognizable faces in the world and also present my work to Arnold Schwarzenegger's former stunt double (pictured next to Arnold below)! 

To de-age Arnold's T-800 by 20 years, I had to apply digital makeup to 6 areas on Arnold's face: his nose, ears, face, hair, neck, and injuries.

Nose and Ears: As a person gets older, the cartilage and skin lose their firmness, causing the nose and earlobes to appear bigger. I shrunk down both of these areas using a Splinewarp node and tracked them back on using Nuke's SmartVectors.

Face: I used a combo of paintout and color grading techniques to subtly remove the puffiness in the eyebags, blemishes, and wrinkles.

Hair: I restored Arnold's hairline by stealing patches of his existing hair and repositioning them. Sampling his more brown hair color from old paparazzi photos, I injected those tonal values into his hair and beard to reduce the amount of gray hairs and bring back some youth. 

Injuries: For my look development, I wanted to amp up how injured Arnold looked to make it feel like the T-800 got more beat up from his previous battle, heightening that sense of danger. As a fun Easter Egg, I took the prosthetic blood from this Terminator 2 screenshot as the base (pictured below). 

I thought my shot turned out great, and luckily Arnold's former stunt double, Peter Kent, thought the same thing.

I also created a series of VFX Explainer videos going into further detail of how I approached the different challenges, plus Arnold's former stunt double's full reaction to my shot. Check 'em out below!

KEYING & INTEGRATION | Deadpool (2016)

I fell in love with the "merc with a mouth" over 10 years ago when the 2013 Deadpool video game came out. Ever since then I've bought some of the comics and went on location to watch both the filming of Deadpool 1 and 2! (some pictures I took on set below)

So when I found this behind-the-scenes footage, I KNEW I had to use it as a project so I could put on my demo reel.

Compression in this 1080p plate turned out to be my biggest obstacle to completing this shot. With blocky pixels and off-colored artifacts on the edges of Deadpool's costume, I could only stretch traditional keyers and edge extend methods so far. 

To recreate his hand motion blur, I had to resort to frame-by-frame painting, directional blur, and other grading methods to restore that look. Did my script look pretty? ... It's questionable. Here's a look at my node tree shenanigans to pull this off (for some reason there's a concerning amount of the color magenta here 😂):

But it was worth it! From one Ryan to another, I hope Ryan Reynolds enjoys this shot as much as I do! 

HAIR KEYING

This shot was a training ground for Keying, a fundamental compositing skill to isolate elements. I used multiple Keyers on different areas to capture this person's fine hair details and semi-transparent fabric in the Alpha channel. I also utilized different Despill techniques on parts of the cloth that had more intense green spill.

Since this was a Keying exercise, I didn't need to integrate a background. Instead, I put a checkered background to indicate transparency with a blue gradient background for more visual appeal. 

MUZZLE FIRE | No Time to Die

This behind-the-scenes shot from the 2021 James Bond film features Nomi, an agent in the middle of a fire fight. My goal was to reimagine this action scene so it could fit in the actual film.

To achieve this, I first had to paint out the cameraman and safety harness. This was challenging as the moving camera eventually obstructs half the background and Nomi. I recreated the background and pillars by carefully blending different still frames together. To reconstruct the sections where the camera blocks the actress, I stole a still frame of the Nomi's body, hand animated it, and tracked it back on top (highlighted in blue below). I also painted out the safety harness attached to her hip.

The actress is using a prop gun, so I had to composite a digital muzzle fire at the end of the gun barrel. I was inspired by the movie's muzzle fires' shapes and sizes so I based mine off of those. 

To enhance the realism, I added light interaction on her body and the pillar to simulate the light emitting from the flash. Also, adding a puff of smoke and the shell casing ejecting from the gun contributed to the realism of the shot. 💨 Despite the muzzle fires only lasting a mere few frames or less, it is crucial to give it punch that elevates the danger in the scene!

To make it feel like Nomi was under heavier gunfire, I rotoscoped her body and integrated more smoke and spark hits on the pillar behind her. 

Now hopefully this shot looks a little bit closer to something that would be in the world of 007!

FX COMPOSITING

Seamlessly integrating FX elements into live-action footage is an important skill, especially in this case where blowing up a cathedral in real life can be a big no-no!

For my look development, I wanted my explosion to mimic the hot, saturated oranges and deep plumes of smokes seen in the explosions from The Dark Knight (2008).

I shuffled out the different passes and color graded the ones required. The explosion FX element itself also required some tweaking as there were some odd effects in certain areas.

For more photorealism, I needed the explosion to interact with the plate. I added a "burn effect" to the bricks surrounding the plumes of smoke. As the explosion erupts, I added interactive 2D lighting underneath it. The real chef's kiss was creating a textured look to this light; the effect was driven by an Alpha channel manually rotoscoped with different opacities depending on the intricate geometry of the architecture.

To make the boom go BOOM!!, I tried to capture that visceral feeling by adding camera shake, lens dirt and light glints as the explosion goes off.

MULTIPASS COMPOSITING - WATERCOLOR ART ROOM

Imagine a day full of deep clouds dancing in the sky, ready to sprinkle your skylight with raindrops. ☁️However, the air is crisp and sunlight still peeks through the cracks - a perfect time to create new things in your art room. ⛅🖌️

That was the vibe I was aiming for with this interior multipass compositing shot. I denoised, shuffled out, and graded the passes as needed.

I added a few touches to make the shot look more photorealistic. I created a custom Godray setup with an animated Noise pattern to create splashes of light across the scene to simulate the sun poking through tree foliage (shoutout to Compositing Academy for the helpful tutorial!)

To purposefully clip the highlights of the sunlight on certain surfaces, I added optical glow. I added a Defocus which was driven using a custom bokeh and the Zdepth channel.

To top the shot off, I blanketed the scene with Grain and slight chromatic aberration on the edges. 

MULTIPASS COMPOSITING | Harbin Grand Theatre

The Harbin Grand Theatre is an astonishing performing arts centre in China. This multipass compositing project was my chance to try to capture this architectural marvel in CG during a cinematic, warm sunset.

A full sky replacement was achieved by swapping the original environment with a sunset HDRi in a sky dome and then tracked back on the scene. The original skyline was reconstructed and placed on top. 

I shuffled out the passes (seen below) and carefully color graded the shot and individual passes as needed to bathe the scene with a soft orange glow.

To have the theatre's interior and surrounding lights pierce through the fading daylight, I meticulously isolated and created optical glow effects for each section using the passes and roto masks. The water's reflection was also manipulated to include the reflection of the new sky and the glow of the pathway lamps.

Atmospheric haze, subtle light rays, lens flare, and chromatic aberration also grace the scene. You can see a few of these effects with the sliders below.

To give the shot a bit more life, I keyed out and added a flock of birds flying back home. Slowing down the camera movement also gave the shot more of a cinematic dollying forward effect.

WALL REPLACEMENT | The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

My love for The Legend of Zelda and the Breath of the Wild video game has now made its way to my local graffiti'ed alleyway!

The clash between good and evil - I wanted to represent this relationship in a complex manner through this wall replacement project. Firstly, I removed the original wall and added in my own wood planks of varying size and texture. To break up the monotony, I added a metal door on the bottom right.

As I composited the elements, I imagined that an artist left a lush mural featuring Link, the noble hero on his steed, representing hope. As time faded, so did the symbolism of the art. Grime and moss has nestled in and people of a more anarchic nature have defaced the art with monsters and Ganon, the epitome of evil. A subtle warm light ray from the sky hits the mural, indicating that hope has not fully faded.

Using a 3D camera tracker, I projected my wall art onto my scene and a smear of Ganon's crimson paint on the side wall. Finally, I rotoscoped the people back on top of the CG.