Tags
Alpha Chromatica Education (ACE)
Author
Andrew ZellerDate
February 25, 2025
Post No.
Alpha 0029
How do you prove you can work on real productions for a client when you are a student or recent graduate?
Ideally you get hired to work on a project and see your name in the credits before even graduating. That is exactly what happened for Moises Moreno, Suelen Rebello, and a few other students of Alpha Chromatica currently working on later episodes. This project has been unique, challenging, and exciting for several reasons:
- CG5 is an incredibly skilled, creative, and internationally successful musician, singer, and songwriter with over 8.25 million subscribers on YouTube. This series is of particular importance in how it tells a completely original story, echoing his move into more original music. I greatly appreciate the trust and opportunity we received from him and William Bradford to pass on to our students.
- We are a school, not a studio, so we do not have essential roles like Producers, Coordinators, Leads, or Supervisors. We rallied together to assign tasks and found help where needed to work as efficiently as possible to follow the budget and timeline. Everyone brought their "A" game.
- The shots we were given required a great deal of look development normally reserved for Senior artists. We collaborated closely to gather, review, and discuss visual references and design variations with William, who provided clear and invaluable guidance for us throughout the process. This involved meetings, emails, moodboards, group and individual messaging for small updates, and sharing screen recordings of workflows within Nuke among the team for consistency.
- To have a genuine vintage look, the project was shot on Hi8 cameras (this model, specifically) and then the analog tapes were digitized. This presented a unique challenge with a lower resolution, limited dynamic range, and heavy noise in darker scenes made it tricky to track, key, and believably integrate elements filmed on newer cameras. We tested a lot of different approaches to find what worked best.
- One of our students had the opportunity to go on set during filming to advise and gather information. Our clients have been very welcoming of involvement and the exchange of ideas over how something could best be filmed or crafted in post-production.
I am so proud of our students and thankful to William, CG5, and all who have supported our collaboration. Please check out our VFX behind-the-scenes video/breakdown below and keep an eye out for our next video.
Watch on YouTube : 
Alpha Chromatica Creating the VFX for CG5's Project U Move: Part 1