GanzChroma 0230
Everything looks the same.
For the last 10 years, I had to listen to recruiters, senior artists, leads, comp supervisors, and even former students tell me the same thing: why do you always use the same plates (background footage)? All the comp reels look the same.
We did our best to acquire costumes, props, get shy and introverted students to act, find the time to do makeup and special effects, scout locations, prep for shoot, shoot, ingest data, plate prep, gather assets for compositing, shoot behind the scenes footage for marketing, and finally teach these new shots to students who barely understood what an alpha was and also had convinced themselves that they couldn't do math.
And it's not like we could pick up these shoots if we messed up. We had to shoot it within that one day or night because we had to return to our regular work schedule the very next day.
Despite all this, we shot hundreds of plates. Yes, I do admit, sometimes it was easier to shoot similar things because we knew it worked, and any risk we introduced usually did not pay off. We didn't have plates tracked nor did we get rendered cg elements from other departments. Students did everything.
Also, no ones realized how hard we worked. Try teaching 20 students of varying skill levels and attention spans from 10 am to 5 pm and then going for a shoot. This is why no one did what we did and why most VFX schools, to this day, focus on teaching CG. The burden of creation falls onto the students' shoulders.
Look no further than the yearly Rookies entries for Visual Effects. Not a lot of plate-based VFX. Even 4 year university programs who had the time and resources couldn't match our intensity and dedication.
Innocently people ask, why can't students shoot their own plates. The truth is, it is going to look rather amateurish because of the students limited knowledge in filmmaking and the lack of resources, and the amateurish plates make their composites look amateurish. People are terrible at judging composites objectively. They look at the plate and immediately assume that this person isn't a good artist. You are judged by the worst aspect of your shot.
How do I know this? Because my former students used their original portfolio to get a job in the VFX industry and were rejected outright. After getting rejection upon rejection, they start searching for a place or a person that can get them to where they want to go.
That is why we founded Alpha Chromatica Education (ACE). We decided that the only way we could get these students noticed was to niche further down.
We plan to spend hundreds of hours with a small group of self-motivated individuals and do our level best to guide them to work on unique plates that are not only challenging but allow them to demonstrate the skill sets that are necessary to work in a comp department.
And we did just that.