VFX Blog #2
NukeX, Story Writing and Filming
Two months finished and a lot more to come. The second month of my visual effect course is over and overall I found that it went pretty good. We worked on a few things this month. First we starting a new program called NukeX. We also worked on are story writing, and the coming up with idea's for projects. The last two weeks we ended working with actors and background people for the first time rather then using are self's are actor's. Some times over the month it didn't seem to busy, but then the next week would be very busy. But we did learn a few good useful tips and tricks.
First year are main that we used and the hardest program to learn was adobe After Effects. I didn't find it to hard and I caught on pretty quick. This is a good program and its very useful for little things such as editing, or on a high projects. But its been drawn to my attention lately that no company's use After Effects
that much. Most of them use a node based program such as Nuke. From a first glance nuke didn't seem that different except using nodes and not a timeline as used in some other programs.
My first time using Nuke was much different then what I thought it was going to be. I found it was a whole new way of thinking about everything , then what I had been previously looking at how everything is put together. Nuke was hard to get going, learning were all the controls were did give me a little difficulty and the naming of nodes and seeing what nodes did took about a week. I didn't like using it at all. I wanted to go back to After Effects. Upon doing are first project , doing research and watching tutorials in Nuke. I then started to learn the advantages of using Nuke. Overall my first impressions after using Nuke is that it's a great program after you understand it and start to use it more often. Doing things faster is what I have to do, and this will come once i start working with this program more.
The last week's of are second month we worked on story writing and filming. Story writing or script writing is much harder then what I thought. We are VFX students and not pre-production. So practice coming up with a good story was a little hard. We tried to collaborate and come up with and idea of something we all wanted , but everything one wanted something else. This we found hard and ended up not coming up with a story for another week. During this we also had a presentation to do at School Fair. It was to show people what are course is about. We did shooting, filming and editing for instructional video for teachers too the last couple of weeks.
During this we learn that not having a storyboard is a lot harder to set up shots and trying to tell everyone what to do when your not as organized, unlike if you had everything prepared. This was a good thing because it got your mind thinking and we ended up pulling it off. There were a few things we realized that would have been better if we had but we manage to do it anyways. Having a steady cam would have been nice and having are sound to record in stereo rather then mono also would have been nice. But are mic's only records in mono so we ending up just duplicating the track for the other side.
Next month should be good and cant wait to see what else we are going to create. Hopefully my website will be done and i can have an online portfolio to show all my work and blogs.
By: Cameron Arseneault
