My life these days consists pretty much of eight solid hours a day of work, throwing some words at the page for a half hour to an hour a night, and sleep. Which means I don't have much of interest to blog about. So I'll talk about work instead.
I'm a junior compositor on the film I'm working on now, which at this company apparently means I'm qualified to paint out wires. At other places, that just makes you a paint artist, usually lumped into paint/roto artist. Which is what I was before. Same job, different title.
Wire removal. Which sometimes involves taking out stray cameramen, boom mikes, cranes, etc. as well. Not a job I'd ever envisioned myself having, seeing as how it is time-consuming, tedious, and requires little brainpower. Strangely enough, I like my job, though. There's something satisfying about creating these pristine film frames, with no trace of wires or intruding cameramen. Painting people out of existence--that's power for you.
Paintwork requires a handful of basic strategies. The most obvious is to paint out the offending object frame by frame. Avoid this if at all possible. Besides the apparent painfulness of this option--shots can run a couple of hundred frames and you'd often have to paint each and every frame--it's very hard to maintain consistency across the frame range. Even if you were to make just one paint stroke on each frame, that would mean you'd have to make the exact same stroke every single time. Otherwise, you end up with crawling, squiggly noise, which would be just as distracting as a wire. Personally, my hand is just not that steady.
The other strategies are mostly variations on a theme. You patch over the sections of the frame where the wires are with a section that's already clean. The clean areas can come from moving over a section of that same frame, pulling from an earlier or later frame, or painting one clean frame to use in the rest of the footage. Basically, you want to try and copy another piece of footage and paste it over the wire, all the while making sure that everything lines up consistently. Did I mention a good measure of meticulous perfectionism comes in handy for this? Depending on the software you use, you can also paint a single stroke and then track that in over multiple frames, which can avoid some of the problems with hand-painting frames.
Having said that hand-painting is to be avoided as much as possible, I've spent most of the past week painting out wires frame by frame by frame. The wires in my shots this week were thrashing around in front of a big, smoky explosion with lots of camera motion. When things are changing that much with every frame, sometimes you have no choice but to hand-paint each one. Luckily smoke is easy to paint. Good times.
Usually, though, you use a combination of strategies for every shot, depending on where the wires are and what kind of motion is in the footage.
I figured I should come up with a clever way that wire removal can be used as an analogy to something writing-related, something related to my recent rethinkings about my writing process. Here it is: Writing is like film-making. There's a lot of grumbling amongst visual effects artists (like me) that on-set filming involves too much use of the phrase, "Just shoot it. We'll fix it in post." Who cares that the wire is obscuring the actor's face the entire scene? Just get it on film--some poor schmuck can fix it later. I grumble because that poor schmuck often ends up being me, but as far as getting a film done on time and within reasonable bounds of the budget, that's often the way you need to work. Get it on film--we'll clean it up later.
Same with stories. Get the words on paper. Worry about cleaning it up, editing it tighter, making it pretty later. It's a little harder when you're writing, because you know the poor schmuck getting stuck with the dirty work is going to be you--but there's a different joy to be found in doing that kind of work, I've found. (Although, sure, it's still tedious and damn hard.)
So don't worry what loose wire are showing in the first draft. Just get it on paper. We'll fix it in post.
Luckily, my niece Ayeka can't read yet, and her dad and mom don't read my blog often (as far as I know), so I can post this picture of what I made her for Christmas.
