JOHN CORNEJO DEMO REEL / SHOT BREAKDOWN

View reel at www.johncornejo.com

Fantastic4
All effects here are 2D. The Invisible Girl's appearance/disappearance is a dissolve between a beauty pass and a clean plate; I developed a 2D displacement method for animating a cross- dissolve keyed from the luminance of the beauty pass: this simulated the refraction effect and replaced a vastly more processor-intensive 3D-based method that had been tried originally. The 2 basketball shots at the end are from a tie-in TV commercial. These shots utilize the 3D-based method for refraction coupled with hand animated cross-dissolves.

Blades of Glory
Stunt skaters on ropes are pulled across the ice to a center point until they are stopped suddenly by restraining ropes. I removed all rigging and comped the skaters together, adjusting the timing and bounce to "make it funny," which I did. Then, the empty upper deck of the arena was filled in with pieces of the crowd in the lower stands, with simple color replacements of clothing and timing shifts of flashbulbs to avoid uniformity.

Eight Below
This show involved digitally altering the neoprene skin of an animatronic leopard seal to create a smoother, oilier appearance; the animatronic was needed for the dogs to interact with. The neoprene folds were replaced with smoother parts of the skin from the same shot which were displaced spatially and/or temporally. A CG sheen element was then applied on top of this.

Sci-Fi Channel Bumpers
Various CG elements were composited to create the transitions. In the hummingbird transition, 2 abstract CG elements were repositioned, retimed, recolored, and layered multiple times to create the "burst" beneath the flowers.

Reign of Fire
The CG flying dragon was composited into the live-action plates using Z-depth fog calculations. Most of the fires in the BG plate are added in the comp from just 3 live-action fire plates filmed in post; these were retimed, resized, flopped etc. to avoid repetition then tracked into the shot.

Miniatures on Live Action
These are scale models shot with motion-control cameras against motion-control BG plates. A single CG element is used for both the engine's flame and for its heat distortion, both applied as 2D processes of color correction and displacement. The dust is from a single 2D stock plate shot on black and comped as several layers with retiming and resizing to avoid repetition.

What Dreams May Come
These shots underwent extensivew 2D manipulation. The original scans were extremely blue due to being filmed outdoors on tungsten film without a correction filter. I extracted color information from the matrixes and restored them into the plate. Then I pulled multiple colorkeys from each channel of the RGB, which were then passed off for particle generation. The multiple particle passes were then composited back onto the live action plate. These shots also feature the large (6K) background plate that I created, which was fully animated with particles and waterfalls. The waterfalls were a mix of CG for the larger falls and 2D falls I created for the smaller falls. Most of this background detail is only visible in a projected 35mm print. Most of these shots have over 300 composited layers.