CG Asset Creator and Illustrator

Final Results

05/25/2025

This past weekend was dedicated to the final push towards our final results. As predicted, I had the least amount of external obligations, so once I finished my shot, I dedicated my time to assisting with other shots, finalizing sound, and putting together the final composition to the best of my ability.

Results

The final cut for our Savannah Skate Shop fake advertisement as of Sunday night.

Individual Contribution

A stained glass fish and crab moving away from a colorful skateboard at the beach.
The changes for my shot, which featured the stained-glass fish and crab at the beach, were very minimal this week, ultimately amounting to color correction.
An image utilizing pure red, green, and blue to show the sides and simple details of a pair of awnings. A skateboard leaning on a bench with a building in the background. It is noticeably overexposed.
A prominent problem in Ella's shot was the overexposed footage causing severe loss of detail. Since I already had her camera tracking data on hand, I was able to put together a way to assist in restoring some lost detail.

Due to some detail loss in her footage, Ella was struggling with the color grading in her scene, with the most glaring issues manifesting in some awnings in the background. Due to the overexposure causing the stripes and other details to appear absent when not in shadow, they became visually distracting. In order to help her fake the detail, I made a simple scene where I constructed the awnings and used the red, green, and blue channels to divide them into sides and stripes.
The result allows her to quickly mask out the stripes on one of the awnings and further divide it into shadowed and highlighted areas for more in-depth color correction.

A camera projection of a store edited to look like the fake Savannah Skate Shop.

Originally, Jacob was supposed to be the person to create our final shot, which would focus on the fake shop, in the form of a matte painting. While he did start work on it, ultimately the work he was producing was too unrefined for the time he was given and very visibly AI-dependent, so I ended up heavily editing it. Once I got the image to a more visually acceptable point, I constructed a mesh for camera projection in Maya, then imported it into Nuke for camera animation and rendering.

Final Thoughts

Going into this project, I was excited to meet students from the Savannah campus and see what they had to offer, since the visual effects department in Atlanta is comparatively small. After our initial pitch, I was very hopeful to see where our project would go, since we received such positive feedback. While most people on the team were exceptionally hard-working and professional, by the time midterms came around, I was much less enthusiastic about our prospects. Without going into too much detail, our original VFX supervisor wasn't quite working at the standard needed for the project to progress smoothly, and even the footage we recorded while visiting Savannah turned out to be unusable.
When I created an organizational system for the team, I did not expect to be offered the role of the new VFX supervisor, but I ultimately decided take on the challenge in hopes of turning around our projectory. While the final results are not quite what I had hoped they would be, due to continued delays despite my best efforts, I am still proud that we got to the finish line anyway. The people I met through this project are incredibly talented and have bright futures ahead of them, and I would not be opposed to working with most of them again. Even though the circumstances were not ideal, I am also glad I was able to gain some experience in a leadership role as well.