Shifting animation’s creative focus | shots – Shots

How do you successfully integrate VFX into live-action without it looking fake, or worse, falling into the Uncanny Valley?

To be able to successfully combine any CG element into a live-action plate, every single stage of production and post-production has to be properly planned. From the shoot to the final compositing.

It all starts with a good concept of the actual character, creature or object you plan to integrate. When designing something using CG (because it doesnt exist in real life) we always ground the design in real-world elements and references. For example, when creating a dragon we look at alligators, bats and other animals to take reference and ideas from, the more elements and features you use that stem from the real world the more grounded in reality it will feel.

The same goes for texturing, animating, and lighting. Besides a good concept, we have to match all the properties of the live-action shoot, the lighting and lensing, making sure that there is proper interaction between the CG elements and the live-action. This could be as simple as ground interaction, or more complex like interacting with a CG creature. Every little detail helps sell the final picture.

Viewers can easily tell when something looks fake but identifying what exactly it is and how to fix it is something that is a lot harder. This is where the Uncanny Valley comes in, a term usually referring to CG photoreal humans.

We are in contact with people every day, all the time, so we know very well what they should look like, this is why its one of the hardest things to achieve in CG. The amount of subtleties in the way skin catches the light, muscles moving underneath the skin, movement of the lips and the look into someones eyes, they all tell you something different, an emotion, feeling, to be able to portray a photo-real human, all these little details have to be correct, and they also have to be correct in the context of the shot. If one little thing is off, the viewer will pick up on it.

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Shifting animation's creative focus | shots - Shots