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Interview by Will McCullough with Frank Rueter:

- Before we get started with your thoughts can you show some of your images with descriptions?



One of my first Mumakil shots on ROTK. Looks kinda weird as a still frame but worked in motion. I think this was used as a Cinefex cover and also for the limited edition Soundtrack CDs.



My last Mumakil shot on ROTK. I had spent a few weeks on it and we were a couple of days away from the final deadline when Peter decided to recall the approved version and change the camera back to an old previz set up to improve the cut. So we ended up having to redo the entire shot in the last 48 hours.
The shot was nominated for the VES "Best Visual Effects Shot of the Year 2004".



One of my first shots for "I, Robot". Nothing to exciting but I liked it. After all the dust, horses and giant elephants on ROTK it was a nice change to comp something non-organic.



This was the first shot I used Nuke for. I built the jungle background including a little stream running through frame with cards and projections. In the end, when I was already working on a different sequence, this got pulled back again because the art direction had changed and the set up was replaced by a single matte painting but at least it had served me well as a little training project.



One of those shots that compers love getting; easy A over B and looks great on a show reel. Thanks to our 3D guys.



For this sequence I ended up creating the entire temple clearing in Nuke using a lot of 3D projections and tons of elements to dress the whole thing with vegetation. I remember being extremely impressed with Nuke's reliable speed and interactivity as the script grew to a somewhat huge pile of nodes. The 3D module really saved us heaps of time as we could just drop in a new camera to run another shot through with minimal extra work.



These are just some examples for environments I did for different sequences on Kong. I didn't comp these ones so kudos to the people that did.

The workflow was to shoot a bunch of tiles on the minis stage using a mocon head and pre-programmed kuper data which we then fed into Nuke to re-project the respective tiles so they would automatically line up.

The task of having to create a workflow for tile set generation inside of Nuke based on kuper data and Weta's database/naming conventions was my incentive to learn tcl a bit more in depth and I discovered a whole new world in Nuke.
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