Cinema / Television

Compositing, Shading and 2D-3D effects

I started my career as a VFX artist.

After graduating from the National Arts and Design school (VFX for TV and cinema class), I spent a few years working in that field and creating various TV ads and Movie special effects.

Some of them I am still quite fond of, even though they are decades old at this point. Here’s a few of them !

Bell Canada

Frank and Gordon national Ad campaign.

Bell Beavers

Frank and Gordon !

During the 2000’s, Bell, a Canadian telecom giant, had a national Ad campaign centered on 2 beavers.

The Ad campaign ranged from TV spots (national broadcasts), banner Ads in subway stations, bus stops … They were everywhere

The campaign lasted well over 5 to 6 years, though my contribution was in their initial and prolific years.

My contribution

My role was to build, render and composite shots.

The build part was making 3D scenes with custom made 3D models, and shaders. It had to look realistic. I would also create VFXs and physics simuations if they were needed.

From there, I would import the work of our animation team onto our beavers, setup all our render passes, and render the shot.

I would finally do the final compositing, blend all the render passes together and output the final shot.

We were a small crew so there was a need to wear many hats !

I was fairly junior at the time, but I would sometimes have a client-facing responsibility to present the end product to the client. Less so on Bell, more so on other Ad campaigns like RONA.

The Flood

A movie that came out in 2007, the flood had pretty interesting VFX shots related to flooding, water, etc.

We had several shots to do for the movie at Buzz. Most of them involved London being destroyed by tidal waves. I was involved with a few of them !

My contribution

On the Flood, I had a few shots that I was involved with. One of which is showed below.

A lot of the work on this series was (you guessed it) about water !

Making the water look realistic, the splashes, the shader, the colors …

I also was responsible for setting up and rendering the various render passes, and compositing the final result.

My contribution

Teletoon had a few promotional Ads for their cartoon segments. I had an involvement with a few of those as a 3D Artist.

I would model any elements we needed (outside characters), setup the 3D scene, create any simulation or physics elements, create the render passes and composite the final shot.

For Teletoon we had a fair amount of spots like the one below. All in all, roughly half a dozen of them were done.

My contribution

Killer wave was a TV project that aired in Europe. I had a role with some of it’s VFX shots.

The most interesting one (to me) was a very long pan-out shot that I made out of a single picture we had of the inside of a wheater shack. We made extensive use of a VFX technique known as Matte Painting to extrapolate a shot out of that picture. The resulting video can be seen below.

In a nutshell, I made the 3D scene and projected the picture onto basic geometry. I then did several photoshop-painted re-projections as the camera panned out to keep the effect going. I created all the render passes and rendered the shot, then took care of the final compositing and output.

My contribution

This was a shot done for Telefilm Canada as a televised commercial.

This one was particularly interesting because it had some decently elaborate physics simulations in it, most notably the “Paper Storm” from 0:00 to 0:07 in the video below.

Following this, the usual 3D scene preparation, render and compositing of the shot.