The Art and Science of Digital Compositing, 2nd Edition

Chapter Twelve. Creating Elements

Visual effects photography, the process of creating the plates that will be used in a composite, is an art and science unto itself. So far we’ve been able to touch on only a few basic guidelines, but in this chapter we will try to provide a few more recommendations, while fully acknowledging that these will mostly be useful for fairly standard situations.

Although we’ll spend the bulk of this chapter discussing things that should be done during plate photography, let’s make it perfectly clear that it’s very likely that many of these things probably won’t happen. Normally it is the job of the visual effects supervisor to see that plates are shot as well as possible, but the realities (and costs) of location shooting ...