I’m incredibly proud of the high caliber of all 16 guest speakers who have met and shared knowledge with our Compositing students at Alpha Chromatica Education (ACE).
Katie Morris is a prime example of such an ideal mentor, with much wisdom to offer from her years of experience working as a VFX artist on 80+ Hollywood feature films and shows including: Wicked, Skeleton Crew, Severance (Season 2), Twisters, The Marvels, The Creator, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, The Batman (2022), The Mandalorian, and more!
In her work for ILM, Boris FX, FXPHD, and other companies, Katie has contributed significantly to the VFX, filmmaking, and software development communities as an artist, supervisor, and trainer. I’ve known Katie for several years and witnessed her rare combination of artistic expertise and passion for teaching. She met with our ACE 3 & 4 students twice to demonstrate trusted workflows and provide personalized recommendations for their plates.
You may have heard the expression: “Fix it in Comp”, but a bigger secret by those who know of Katie’s abilities is: “Fix it in Paint.” She has painted by hand, sometimes frame-by-frame, things that would have cost significantly more to re-render or perhaps couldn’t have been fully resolved any other way. Generative AI isn’t going to replace her: she already uses machine learning as a tool to make her workflows even more efficient, while single-handedly overcoming any obstacle in her path.
The demand for what Katie can do is why Educator Ganz Ramalingam and I have consistently prioritized our compositing students learning about the capabilities of painting in Nuke and Silhouette. We believe our students need to have experienced a variety of paint challenges and techniques before graduating, including both patching and frame-by-frame work. Our students learn how to make dynamic patches using tracking data, animated transforms, warping, morphing, smart vectors, and color grading setups that procedurally or manually adapt to changes in lighting. More importantly, they work on unique shots and have to bring their shots to completion (after hitting many notes) entirely on their own.
You won’t know the impact of what one truly skilled paint artist can do until you’ve had the opportunity to see them in action. Katie isn’t the kind of Supervisor who merely points out pixel problems and hasn’t touched a shot in years. She has remained “in the trenches” working with (and training) some of the best VFX artists in the world. Thank you, Katie, for crafting so many iconic shots from our favorite movies (watch her demo reel) and for inspiring future generations to not only push technology forward, but also our own abilities to reach new heights for human creativity.
I highly recommend checking out Katie’s courses on rotoscoping and painting in Silhouette. Follow the link below for course teasers, discounts, free versions, and more exclusive info.
In what ways does Katie Morris’s approach of “Fix it in Paint” challenge the more common “Fix it in Comp” mindset, and why might this make hand-painted fixes more valuable in a VFX workflow?
Good question. Thank you for that.
I would say the main advantages of fixing something in paint is it can be faster and cheaper than fixing it in comp. A Nuke comp script can be quite heavy to load, adjust, and render. Painting on top of the comp, particularly in a raster-based paint program like Silhouette FX, as Katie demonstrated, can be very quick to load, adjust, calculate, and render.
For example: if the client wants a few more rain drops in a scene, it’s going to be slow and expensive to go back to the FX department for that element to be made or adjusted and rendered out. The client may not like it if I swap out my 2D rain element with another that changes everything, and a particle setup in Nuke is going to be slow to load/adjust/render. Some masking would need to be done to preserve the rain the client likes and only add a few more drops. Then the comper has to make sure they blend well with the other elements in terms of timing, direction, scale, etc. Meanwhile, a paint artist could clone paint rain drops to match existing ones incredibly fast, simply by hand-painting them on frames that need them.
I hope that answers your question.