Stephen Richardson Demo Reel 2024

This is a reel of what I have learned this year as a VFX compositor. I've chosen two pieces to showcase a broad selection of the skills I've learned: a King Kong CG clip and a live plate Green Screen composite.

Kong

Kong was an interesting and enjoyable piece because of the fantastical nature of it. The main focus of this piece was to composite various components together using the various AOV passes. Compositing the background was fairly straightforward. I shuffled the position and normal passes into the beauty render and it's AOVs and then did some light grading. I used a couple of noise nodes to simulate fog and I finished up by adding some exponential glow to the moon.

Kong himself required more finesse. After shuffling in the position and normal passes, I used the depth pass to simulate Kong stepping out of the fog as he got closer to the foreground. I then the diffuse and specular passes to adjust the lighting on Kong. Finally, I plugged the depth pass into zDefocus and adjusted the camera's focus.

The process for compositing the woman and platform in the foreground was very similar to Kong, except my mentor and I felt the shadows were too deep at the back of the rocks. To adjust the lighting the way I wanted to, I ended up shuffling the normal passes to rgb, using Hue shift to point the normals in the direction I wanted, and then using that shifted image as an alpha for some minor grading. Just as with Kong, minor grading adjustments were made using the specular and diffuse passes and defocus was added using the depth pass and the zDefocus node.

Lastly, the FX (drool, breath, dust, leaves and fire) added on top, with some exponential glow added to the fire. Then chromatic aberration, lens dirt and grain was added to the plate.

Credit is to be given to Josh Parks for helping walk me through how to complete this composite and CG Spectrum for providing the assets.

Driving Green Screen

This composite was far more difficult for me. I struggle with keying and this was an excellent learning experience. I used Primatte to develop my hard key and several different IBK gizmos to develop my soft keys. Due to the way the scene was shot in the original plate, the green spill was severe. I need to despill several areas separately, as can be seen in the despill section of my script, to get things to looking nice. To add the reflection of the sky on the left of the windshield, I keyed that section of the car separately, and rotoscoped the reflections out and used the sky from my background plate as the reflection.

To add something more to the shot, I 3d-tracked the background shot and created a geometry cloud.  I used a card to add a for sale sign and placed the scanline render over the top of original plate. Finally, I color graded everything so it all matched nicely, regrained the composite and rendered it out.

A huge thank you to my mentor Romina Rabti-Zolpirani for helping me troubleshoot when I got stuck and credit to ActionVFX for use of the assets.