CGA Belgrade presents: Digital Compositing Master Class by Victor Perez

Serbia Film Commission and Crater Training Center are proud to announce that the acclaimed compositing guru and director Victor Perez is coming back to Belgrade for the most exciting CG weekend of the year..

On September 25, Perez will hold a 6-hour master class on the use of light in compositing. The event will be held in Crater Training Center starting  from 12:00 to 20:00. The maximum number of participants is 10, therefore, we encourage artists to apply for a chance to attend the master class. 

The selection will be based on the candidate’s professional experience and motivation to jump on board for this exclusive occasion. If chosen to attend the master class, you are obliged  to the participation fee of 70 EUR.

Attending the master class will give you an exclusive opportunity to win a year-long FREE NUKE™ LICENSE, officiated by our friends at Foundry. 

The day before, live at mts Dvorana, Perez will hold an inspiring session on Mind-Mapping Conceptualisation of Light in front of the crowd at CGA Belgrade 2022 conference.

Proceed below to read more about the class’ syllabus and concept.

The goal for the visual effects compositor: Photorealism, or the art of composite layers of images to look coherent using the physics of light at the service of an idea: storytelling. The art of compositing consists in merging two or more images making them look like they have been shot at the same time with the same camera and lenses, under the same lighting conditions. 

Applying the physics of light in a photorealistic environment could not always be artistically synthesized in simple formulas or fixed structures due to the complexity of the light phenomena but understanding the journey a ray of light has taken from its source to get to the screen could lead to a more scientific analysis of the image composition process to replicate and emulate the qualities and artifacts of light as the eye perceive it interpreted by the lens of the camera.

To log the events in the lifetime of a specific ray of light, Victor Perez proposes a Mind Mapping Analysis Structure to translate the physics of light into mathematical operations within Foundry® NUKE™ nodal-based compositor. An articulated system of observation to guide compositing artists in the fantastic odyssey into the invisible.

This course is divided into 2 blocks (3 hours each):

• Primary color transformation operators & decoding of the Characteristic Curve for a target image match
• Secondary overall color operators: understanding brightness, contrast, and saturation & CG
• compositing script structure for replicating lensing artifacts
• Multipass setups and narrative manipulation of light
• Elements of Light & Lighting Qualities Applied in NUKE™
• Integrating NUKE™ CG Relighting Workflow
• The Shadows Workflow

Victor Perez is a film director, creative and visual effects artist with more than 25 years of combined experience, and has worked on many Hollywood films, including The Dark Knight Rises, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, plus many more.

Considered a visual effects compositing guru, his breakthrough work in virtual cinematography on ‘Echo’ earned him a nomination at the Visual Effects Society (VES) Awards in 2019 (the first time in history a short film was considered in this category), in the same year that wins the Italian Academy Award for his work as VFX Supervisor on The Invisible Boy: Second Generation, Victor started his career in the film industry as a photographer and digital compositing artist. He then worked on collaborations as a 2D technical director and consultant where he developed a combination of both artistic and technical understanding of film post production and visual effects from a photorealistic point of view. Today, he designs and oversees the process creation of feature film visual effects as VFX Supervisor.