I was recommended to the VFX Supervisor on Aviator, Rob Legato, by a mutual friend, and I ended up doing effects work for quite a large number of shots in the film (or, at least, given that it's a major film, a large number for just one person sitting at home in their office).

The first batch of shots were all from a sequence in a hanger with the semi constructed 'plane in the background. The physical fuselage and wings were, shall we say, not holding up on camera and had to be replaced. None of it was shot with tracking in mind and much of it is on wide lenses, so none of the moving shots would quite track properly. As a result of this almost-but-not-quite tracking, the fuselage in the moving shots is quite often slowly shifting through a sequence of bizarre morph targets in order to compensate for the incorrect track. At one point it'll be bent like a banana, then slowly it will straighten for a while, only to then squish thinner at the back and wider at the front. Hopefully all of this jiggery-pokery is invisible in the final shots unless you really know what you're looking for.

The other problem with the hangar shots was that the nice new transparent nose cone allowed us to see straight through to the old version behind it. I got around this by building a clean 3D replacement for the hangar behind the nose cone. Unfortunately, the tracking was off, and so the objects that can be seen through the replacement nose in the moving shots are all animating, slowly moving into new positions that fool the viewer into seeing them as motionless.

I don't have any of the finals for the work I did on Aviator, as this was just another in a long line of projects where the Producer concerned simply didn't bother to get me my footage, despite being asked repeatedly. For example, as I didn't do any of the final comps for any of the shots where the 'plane is in flight, I had to rip those shots from the DVD in order to include them in my demo reel. I mention this only to explain why there's so little material here out of the twenty seven shots I worked on for the film. Well, that and I wanted to whine about the Producer not getting me my footage.

The fuselage and wings of the then under-construction XF-11 were digitally replaced in all of the shots inside the hangar (I bet you didn't know that when you saw the film). It's fairly easy to see why they were replaced, as the nose cone on the physical prop is particularly unconvincing. Clicking on this image will open a larger version where you can see an A/B of the before and after images.

This is typical of the work that I did on Aviator. This was designated as shot xf15. If you're wondering what I did, in the original plate there's no 'plane and no shadow for the 'plane. If you click on the image to the left it will play a .mov of the shot.

I'd like somebody to compare the quality of my shots to the quality of the shots done by the mighty Sony Imageworks with all of their resources and people, basically because their shots (such as the section where this 'plane is taking off) are pretty ugly and as a result I'd come off looking like some sort of short, fat, bearded effects god.

This, for no good reason, is a .mov of shot 'bc10'. Click on the image to the left to play it.