BRAVE NEW WORLD
Role: VFX Supervisor, Compositor, Motion Graphics Animator
Company: Jay Shetty & Icon Media
Published: 2020
During the 2020 Covid lockdowns, riots, protests, and social discourse took place both online and on the streets. It was very easy to be taken aback by our social dilemmas, and look past the many inspirational moments of humanity coming together to survive a dire global pandemic. In this video, the podcaster, and youtuber Jay Shetty seeks bring light to these moments of hope via a futuristic - and seemingly distopian - narrative via a series of futuristic holograms looking to images of the past, and our current present.
For this project I was tasked with designing the look of all of the holograms & VFX seen on the video, building each interface from 2D graphics up to direct integration with our subjects on screen. This project was very involved in both design skills, as well as roto-scoping, camera tracking, and green screen FX in order to give off a convincing look to the audience of a futuristic classroom. As the head mograph and FX designer, I was also tasked with performing VFX supervisor tasks on set, taking care of camera angles and shots being properly stabilized and green screens well lit in order to have the best production to post-production fluency.
VISUAL EFFECTS PIPELINE
This was my first time compositing motion graphics onto live-action footage, and it was a challenge. Our producer, Kevin Finn, approached me with this grand idea he had about placing Jay as the teacher of a classroom in a post-apocalyptic, future world. We worked together on set to give Jay and our camera crew a series of visual cues and angles to where it could make it easy for us to insert holograms that followed along with Jay's dialogue in post. The idea was to code Jay's words with powerful imagery from the time to bring our futuristic vision home.
A WORLD OF HOLOGRAMS
During the concepting phase of our digital world, I looked at various sci-fi movies & video games with edgy, fluorescent, and cyberpunk-esque graphics that gave off the dystopian feel we were going for. I reached for everything from Halo to The Matrix and other cult classics like Alien. Once I had an idea in mind, I began to draw out rectangles, parallelograms, and circles with standard shape & stroke layers in after effects. I would animate one, and then duplicate its pieces to combine them into a different hologram, and so I developed a quick system for developing several variations of these holographic glyphs that in turn would create a window to what the world was like in 2020.
VFX COMPOSITING
During the compositing phase of this project, I experimented with several camera tracking & null objects in After Effects to place my holograms on the scene, and make it look as if Jay was controlling them. Once the tracking was down, I began to add several glow effects to the hologram, which would later dictate what kind of light was bouncing of the subjects & nearby surroundings. Since so many of the surrounding objects were made out of plexiglass, we had a lot of very involved extra reflections, which meant I had to create an extra layer of tracking for each so that they stuck to their corresponding surfaces.
CREDITS
VFX Supervisor, Mograph Animation: Nestor Tomaselli
Executive Producer, Director: Kevin Finn
Lead Actor: Jay Shetty
Script Supervisor: Nicolette Shutty
Lead Editor: Ron Haas
Editor: Matthew Robinson