The making of Feedback: The Riverbank scene. A pilot for a 3D computer animated film.

The compositing and editing of the Riverbank scene happened simultaneously. We used Adobe AfterEffects as our tool for accomplishing both of these tasks. A screengrab from Adobe AfterEffects showing the image sequence layers stacked on top of one another to create the shot. We first created a composition for each shot. This composition contained all the shots rendered layers and included colour-correction and effects. A second composition was created for each sequence. For example, we broke our riverbank scene down into the following sequences:
	a. Dawn at the riverbank b. Detective Deadly Serious is surprised c. Detective Deadly Serious talks to the boys at the tree. d. The trio walk back to the riverbank. e. Myrth catches the fish. f. Byrth and Myrth argue over the hook. g. Byrth and Myrth play good cop/bad cop with the fish h. Myrth releases the fish.
A third composition was created as a “master” composition of the entire scene. This contained all the sequence compositions.

We found that nesting the shots in this manner allowed us the greatest degree of freedom in making changes. The individual shot compositions were multi-resolution. They could house the initial grey animatic, the refined animatic, and finally the rendered shot. As each stage was passed, their layer was simply switched off. This had the advantage of leaving a reference of how the shot had progressed. Once the rendered shot had been assembled, colour-corrected and had its effects applied, it too was rendered to a Quicktime animation file. This file was then inserted into the shot composition and the individual layers were turned off. This was done to improve the speed performance of AfterEffects when editing the sequence and master compositions. If we made changes to the shot, we just replaced the appropriate image sequences, turned off the rendered layer, turned on the individual layers and re-rendered.
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