I Was The Worst Artist at the Studio

This was 2002, I had been a compositor for less than a year. I was hired at the VFX studio Hybride Technologies in Quebec, to work on Spy Kids 3-D.

It was obvious after about a week that I was not good enough to work on final shots. I was so bad that they moved me to the ‘Pre-comp’ department where I would organize a comper’s elements before the shot was assigned to them.

I didn’t realize until years later that there is no ‘pre-comp’ department. They made it up so I would be out of the way.

It sucks to know that you’re the worst member of a team. I would look over their shoulders at their setups, amazed at what they could do. That’s when I realized that ‘there are levels to this’, and I was nowhere near where they were.

I was miserable, and just wanted to go home.

I remember one late night at the studio, a senior compositor explained his setup to me. I remember not understanding a lot of what he was doing. He looked at me and said “Joe, compositing is like visual math. Once you understand that, this will all make sense”

That helpful advice made me feel worse, I sucked at math.

When I came back to Toronto, I was humbled and not sure if this career was right for me.

Before I left for Quebec I bought the book ‘Digital Compositing for Film and Video’ by Steve Wright. I started to read it, but none of it made sense to me. It was one of those times when you read something but nothing sinks in. It might as well have been in another language.

But this time, I read it and it was like something had popped in my brain. I understood it all. I must have absorbed just enough examples at Hybride that now the concepts in that book were totally clear.

This was a magical feeling. It was almost like a switch in my brain had been flipped from off to on. I’ve never experienced anything like it since.

But the big thing that saved me was that I got a job as a teacher in a VFX course at a college. That forced me to understand compositing well enough to explain it. That clarity of thought really cemented my knowledge.

This created a virtuous cycle. I would learn the new features in Nuke to show it to the students. But once I knew it, I started using it at work. Once I used it at work, I had more practical knowledge that I would share with my students. This pattern has repeated itself again and again. At first with comp, then with matchmoving and again with Houdini.

If you find yourself stuck, if you’re struggling with a subject, I’d recommend that you think ‘how would I teach this to someone else’. If you really want to take it to an extreme, make a video tutorial on the subject. You don’t have to release it, but going through the steps of explaining it will force you to learn enough to really understand the subject.

The other technique that really helped me grow as an artist was actually doing the work. There’s a popular anecdote known as the ‘Ceramics Class Experiment”. I don’t think this was an actual scientific study, but it’s a good story.

A Ceramics teacher had two classes of students. They tell one class that they’ll be graded just on the quantity of ceramic pots they made, with no consideration about the quality of the pot. The other class would be graded on the excellence of their best piece of work.

At the end of the term, there was a surprise with the final results. The class that focused on quantity also produced the best work. They pumped out pots and learned from each mistake, improved their skills and eventually produced high quality work. The quality group had theories about perfection and had planned carefully, but had little to show for it at the end.

This is where personal project can be so helpful. Experimentation and lots of practice can lead to better results than being paralyzed by wanting things to be perfect on the first try.

It’s not rocket science, but those two techniques helped me grow more than anything else:

Know a subject well enough to teach it (ideally, actually teach it to someone)
Practice and improve enough to get all the bad art out of your system.

Yes, I know this is easier said than done, but it's what has helped me the most.