Well, it’s official. Windsong has named its 2021 Employee Of The Year: Austin Newell.
Austin came to us a mostly self-taught VFX artist, armed with the gift of sharing his ingrained know-how from nearly 10 years of video production experience. What we love about having his eye on projects is that he’s so invested in the process and generous with his ideas. All this to say, when it comes to Austin, we’re just not sure there’s anything the dude can’t do. We’re pretty pleased to say he’s Employee of the Year!
Enjoy your new office/edit bay, our dude! You deserve it.
We thought we’d boast a few projects Austin brought to life with his visual effects editing. Enjoy this peek behind-the-scenes as well as a few insights from Austin, himself, about the post-process.
Renewable Solar + Jeffrey Scott Agency:
“Legacy”
This next video is a layer pass. From RAW, through all the color passes, and then through the VFX passes for the actor’s facial changes:
Jeremiah + Austin: “In post, the scene was graded to be moodier and the actor’s facial contrast boosted to add some wrinkles and age. Then, it was taken through a process that utilized a mix of applications and calculations from sample references from an older actor he was portraying to come up with an age look. Using key features from the older actor, such as the eye brow, helps marry the two actors together. This was then composited, best bits blended and tracked to the actor. A second color pass helped marry the effects together.”
Central California Blood Center + Janzen Brands:
“Accentuate the Positive”
Austin: “This was a tough one to figure out and took a little bit of trial and error on some test shots before we found a system that worked. We knew we had a certain size we wanted the people to be and after some test shots we settled on a 6-inch-sized person. So, we bought a small, posable art-figurine that would act as our “stand-in” for when we were getting our background plates. We framed our shot with the figurine then removed it. 
To solve for the size, height, and angle of the people we were shooting on the green screen, we came up with an idea that involved two prop “X”s one small and one big. The small X was made with a specific size that would go in front of the figurine for reference when shooting the background plates. Then we made a bigger X, exactly 400% bigger, that we would place in front of our actors on the green screen. Once we overlaid the small X with the big X and matched them in size and position in frame, then that gave us a very close estimate of where the actors would be if we shot them like the figurine.
I was on set for all parts of this process to help keep track of any background clean plates we needed, as well as getting reference shots with the figurine.”
Central California Blood Center + Janzen Brands:
“Amazing What You Can Do”
In this part of our Central California Blood Center series “Amazing What You Can Do” we took a nod from action movies from the past. Our stunt team kicked it out of the park and Austin legitimized those classic genre explosions with his VFX skills. (Just pause at :11!)
Central California Blood Center + Janzen Brands:
“All Rise”
Austin: “We had to make Aaron float into the sky, but for the sake of time and safety we decided against any harness or lifts. So, we came up with the idea of shooting Aaron in two parts on a green screen and then combine them in post to make him look like he is floating in the air:
PART 1. Aaron doing his take with his arms crossed.
PART 2. We had him pull himself up on a pull up bar, so that we could get his legs to hang naturally and not look like he was standing on the ground.
In post, I combined his legs from the hanging take with his top performance and used his belt line as the seam. On set I was tasked with making sure we had all the background clean plates we needed along with anything we needed to do with Aaron, in the limited time that we had him.”
Roger’s Jewelry + Jeffrey Scott Agency:
“Make Your Own Love Story”
Austin: “This project was a first for me, at this point I had never digitally added facial hair to someone in post who had zero facial hair on camera.
Sometimes I will touch up or fill in spots that need it, like digital hair and makeup. This was a first going zero to 100 on what was happening to his face.
Faces are hard to mess with when it comes to VFX because even with all the money and time to age or de-age someone, it will always look weird. Because everyone knows what a face looks like. Luckily, this was only adding to a face, rather than adjusting or altering it. This effect is, essentially, a digital “beard mask” added to his face. Then, I tracked certain portions of his face to make the beard warp and move with the shape of his mouth and jaw.
The edit really worked in my favor where you were never really sitting on his face for too long before it cut away, so it helps sell the effect better.”
Thanks for sharing!