Victor taught his first course at fxphd in the April 2014 term, and from the start his preparation and teaching skills were appreciated by our members. What’s quite interesting about Victor is his history with fxphd. He was one of our first members when fxphd started over eight years ago, and has seen things now both from the perspective as a student and now a prof. It’s not an easy job to teach and involves a tremendous amount of preparation, so what drives him to give back to the community?

Victor: Well, I always enjoyed sharing my knowledge with my colleagues when I’m at work doing compositing as many of them share theirs with me, kind of an “oral tradition” to learn. Of course there are amazing books and tutorials out there that explain our craft in an outstanding way, but to be honest I never enjoyed much that kind of one-way learning for any kind of art, as I consider questions and answers, for a student is as important as the “lecture” itself.

I speak now as a student I’ve take many courses around the world (including fxphd courses since its beginnings) and what I like the most is the possibility to ask questions that may seem silly that for me helped me to make sense of everything.

As a teacher is almost impossible to give all the information regarding a technique in an so universal way that everybody -independently from his/her experience, background, culture, language and other particularities- could understand with no questions at all. So as a student of fxphd I loved to be in touch with my teachers, ask my questions and get my answers, or maybe reading other people questions which helped me understand better each topic. The forums, the place to exchange knowledge, to be connected, part of the course.

Years after joining fxphd as a student I got back as a professor, that was a pleasure not only as an artist but also, to discover, from the other point of view how important are the students in the course as they shaped the pace and contents of it. They pushed me to explain things that weren’t not initially in the lesson plan but they claim to need to learn in order to master my lessons. The classes just got better and better, we all learn… I’m just the master of ceremonies here. I’m so proud of each of them and the feedback was great. So this is the closest experience to a live class at a world wide scale, that even allows me to keep working as an artist, so: I learn from the field and I deliver to my student’s homes, fresh! That’s why I’m back.

So that’s a bit of background as to the community at fxphd and one big reason why Victor enjoys teaching. The idea for this new course actually came from Victor when I approached him about teaching back to back terms.

Victor: Very often I’ve been asked if I am “more technical or more artistic compositor” and my answer is always the same: “I don’t know. For me Art and Technique are a whole, impossible to separate, even more so if both of them are influenced by Technology. For me Python, the way I use it, *is* compositing. At an industrial level of professional efficiency when you are working on a shot you are expected not only to be good but also to be fast.

I’m sure many people can be good if they have plenty of time and no pressure to finish the shot, but in a real production environment you are on a tight schedule with lots of pressure. Don’t forget: compositors are at the production (and vfx) chain so everybody is waiting for you to deliver the movie. It means the smarter you are, the more you are going to enjoy the process instead of fighting against the clock. Technique needs to be a natural knowledge to be applied in every occasion, so the more you know and the more diverse skills you possess, the more versatile you would be as an artist, giving to each shot the treatment it deserves: doing the most with less time and fewer nodes.

Python changed my life as a compositor, and let me tell you: I’m not a programmer, I’m an artist, but if you put Python at the service of Nuke you will fly as a compositor. Knowledge makes you free. Sometimes you need a certain piece of script to do something the way you like it to be done. Why use somebody else way of doing things when you could do it your way? It’s natural, we are artists and we cannot be “serialised”.

That’s the purpose of my course, to provide the knowledge in a easy-to-digest process in order to allow my students to be free to create using code. Materialise ideas into nodes. They may work just for you, but boy, it would be your way, and there is nothing more powerful for an artist than the condition to create in a natural and instinctive way.

A lot of people are a bit scared of Python as they don’t have a practical idea on how to apply it, that’s why I decided to create this course, to have a solid knowledge of the language and an application of it to the creation of “something”. It’s like learning maths at school, it’s often boring as they are just “useless numbers on a board”, not so fancy, then you start using maths in your life for many many things (if you are a vfx artist even more) and it gets interesting, because you’ve found an application, a purpose.

My challenge here is to teach this subject in a way is both interesting and fun. I’m enjoying a lot and the students in the forums are kindly sharing their positive feedback so I guess this method works… and this is just the “boring” part -even if they are enjoying- wait to see when they start populating Nukepedia with new tools the did.

Once the “snake” bites you, you will see things in a different way. Once you have these resources you cannot help but use them. All super-star compositors I know have a solid understanding about Python scripting. Why should we keep doing just “A over B”?

 

Free preview: class #1 of NUK227

We wanted to give a flavor of Victor’s course, so we’ve made the entire first class available free of charge. Remember, this is just one of many NUKE courses running this term at fxphd. We also have our NUK309: Advanced NUKE & Digital Environments (watch a free preview), being taught be Emmy-award winner Eran Dinur. And Double Negative’s Ludovic Iochem is teaching the final of his three part series in DMP203: Digital Matte Painting Techniques III.