Visual Effects for Everyone!
Ever since seeing Jurassic Park as I kid I’ve been amazed with visual effects in cinema. When I was in high school, I began experimenting with green screens, compositing, and motion graphics. I had an obsession with creating content that stood out visually to what everyone else was making at the time. This was when Myspace and Youtube had just made their debut to the world; and little to everyone’s knowledge at the time, consumer media was in the process of profound change, for better or worse. Indie filmmaking was making the big shift into shooting and processing everything digitally. Along with the digital transition, home computers were also getting big gains in performance thanks to more powerful graphics processors. This enabled creators to make more complex visuals with relatively low cost machines.
Now, we’ve seen apps like Vine, Tiktok, and Snapchat capable of creating beautiful real-time visual effects using only the processing power of your mobile phone. I can’t even imagine what the future holds for consumer media and the generations that grow up with it. As Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
This is my latest visual effects reel from several projects I did throughout 2021…and some older reels to boot.
Original, complex visual effects will always be an artistic driven skill, but with the advancement of processing hardware and AI it's becoming more readily available to the average consumer.