The vast majority of VFX that appear in modern films and television are “invisible effects,” which means that ideally the audience has no idea they’re watching something that’s either been digitally altered or is completely synthetic. To create this effect, we have to observe reality and then replicate it.

And there is not just one reality an artist has to deal with. There are in fact 6 of them.

The Physical Reality, the real world; the Photographic Reality, the reality that is captured by the camera; the Perceptual Reality, how you perceive the world; the Imagined Reality, how you imagine reality to be; the Expected Reality, how your leads, supervisors, and directors want it to be and the Approximate Reality, how the computer mathematically creates a virtual reality.

This Compositing Program, the first of its kind in the world was designed to teach students about these realities. It gives the students a framework for understanding Visual Effects. Through a unique and iterative workflow, students are taught how to learn to composite photo-real images.

There is no hiding in photo-realism, if it does not look photo-real then it isn’t real. All we have done over the last 10 years at Lost Boys is to teach students how to perform this magic trick without getting caught.