Before I was known as a compositing instructor, I was a 3D generalist.

Most people don't know this: the CG assets my students composited in the compositing program? I made them. Or purchased and heavily modified them to fit within our pipeline.

Just like in real production, compositors don't make their own CG assets. They get elements from lighting and rendering departments.

So I became their lighting and rendering department.

I even built in rendering glitches on purpose. Sometimes the gremlins showed up on their own because that's what gremlins do. Either way, my students learned to wrangle them.

Because my job wasn't to give them perfect passes to composite.

My job was to prepare them for the reality of the work.

That's why my students get jobs.

P.S. Yes, It's my Banana. Old habits... Die Hard.