“the 3 George band (or what happens when you don’t have a vfx supervisor on set)”

you can watch the full music video HERE


to preface - the missing on set vfx supervisor was technically me (unofficially as a small budget school thesis when you are the person doing the post work you take on any and every role to do with post, an editor becomes a compositor becomes a DIT becomes a vfx supervisor; and so on 

george does record all their instruments for their tracks themselves but had a group of musicians that backed them up when they played live (aka “the handsomes”) but during pre-production there ended up being zero availability for the rest of the musicians. our art director krista floated out the idea of george playing all the instruments themself, and then later bringing them together into a “three-george band” which even with my limited compositing skills and very very beginner nuke skills at the time, i felt pretty competent doing a simple split screen- 

comfort and competency went out the window when i got ahold of the footage and was building the offline edit, some kind of miscommunication must have happened but i got three shots to work with, that looked like this: 



three setups of george on each instrument; all different camera angles, unique set dressings, different dof etc - and no plate shot. 

and i was ready to scrap the concept completely except that as the offline editor, i did really get attached the to the idea 😬️ - and so true to fashion i decided i would try to fix it in post (and it kinda worked - though clearly there are some issues that you can spot even just in the picture off the start that i won’t blame on encoding - but luckily most of these shots i was able to hide in a screen comp which i will eventually post about and link here when it’s up) 


first things before i could try frankenstien-ing all of these george’s together was to get a base plate - so taking the shot of george on the mic since it offered the most amount of space to slot in the georges with how the set had been arranged, i got to work




this was a multi-step process of roto-ing out george, extending the floor and paint outs here and there to blend the extended background into the cyclorama, i also added a soft defocus to the background and hoped that the little inconsistencies left behind would be fuzzed over 

when aproaching each shot i also knew that this 3-george-band shot would be appearing multiple times throughout the music video, so i tried to set up a workflow where i wouldn’t be doing too much of the same work, over and over again - so as much as possible, i tried to separate each take of george into two parts- usually separating george from the instrument they were playing 

starting with the drums i roto’d out the kit and stencil’d out any of the little windows where george’s legs or arms would peak through so i could use this roto shape across multiple different points of the song and their playing would still match up properly with the track




pulling george playing was a much easier shape as i could slot my stencil’d shape of the drums ontop - the important thing was making sure i got their feet especially the right foot and pedal lined up properly with the right cymbal and the left cymbal lined up with the cymbal stand





the composition of all three shots provided for the three-george-band featured george at various angles standing to the left of the frame. this caused two dilemmas - one being how to set up each george in the new frame so that they all fit but also when placing the georges to the right of the frame having to warp the angles that they were shot at so that they matched the framing from the “base plate” shot 

i’m still not entirely satisfied with how george on the base turned out, think they should have been scaled up more but, i was running out of space in the frame




to save my sanity i did a lot of luma keying to get some rough keys from the white cyclorama to mix with each other and some roto-ing to extract the george’s




luckily george on the mic and guitar was almost completely on the cyclo to save me from pulling my hair out trying to pull a key for their hair




the because of the way the guitar caught the light the luma key didn’t entirely work when trying to grab the bottom half of george on the mic- so i went in and just did a dirty roto to matte out the entire body of the instrument and combined that with the luma key 




in the end it worked out- kinda. like i mentioned in the beginning there are many spots for improvement and multiple moments where the key doesn’t quite do it’s job and should have been finessed or properly roto’d but in a crunch for time, my experience with compositing and it being a team of one i’m not unhappy with the outcome. especially when this entire comp would be then comp’d onto an analog television with some heavy spikes in the scanning patterns 

in the end this is what my node tree was looking like- and i was able to swap out the >read nodes with the unique takes from different parts of the song and for the most part be able to render with minor additional tweaks