New course: Artistic Foundations, Part 1

Our new release, taught by Ludovic Iochem, is designed for anyone who wants to improve their skills of creating beautiful imagery and explore what makes that image beautiful. While visual effects is a very technical industry, it is important to be able to create compelling and beautiful pictures. Using paintings, photography, and other imagery this course explores key concepts such as composition, lighting, perspective, colour harmony, and more.

Ludo, who has been a Digital Matte Painter and Environment Artist for more than 13 years, had noticed recently that VFX artists were more and more technical, but less and less conscious of basic rules of composition or color harmony. He has worked to improve this situation by creating and leading training for artists, and has been very successful in improving their basic artistic knowledge.

This course focuses on rules and concept which have been developed in art, painting, photography, or concept art.  “I really wanted to create this course to go back to the fundamentals of what makes a nice image,” says Ludo. “It is extremely important to always keep these concepts in mind. That is obviously very clear for a Concept Artist or a Matte Painter, but also very true for a Lighting TD, a Layout artist or a Environment TD.”

Ludo has been practicing his craft starting in a time where “we would have to create massive cyclorama with no 3D, only by merging photographs together and make sure that would look very realistic,” he relates. “That’s why I’ve had to work a lot on lighting, details, perspective, composition, etc… then I moved into Lead role, then Supervisor, and now Head of Digital Matte Painting at DNEG. I also always been really into Art and have practiced the photography.”
In addition to the Artistic Foundation series of courses, Ludo is also leading our new VFX cross-discipline course that is currently in production. The production scene starts with a drone shot revealing a large city and castle perched on a cliff overlooking a river. “It is going to be epic,” says Ludo. “We’ll cover Matchmove, Layout, Build, Crowd, Environment, DMP, Lighting, FX and Compositing — a complete VFX Course. I am very excited about it!”