Gregory Gelzakos is a very active member of the Fusion community and has recently completed work on a new commercial
for Siemens. Gregory was kind enough to sit down with eyeon to share the finer points of this project. This is the first instalment of our new interview
series, so get ready to meet a host of hot DF artists from around the globe.
Click here to view the final commercial. 
(Quicktime format, 4.5 Mb)
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| eyeon: Can you explain who this commercial is for? |
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This commercial was made for Siemens and it’s about their new kitchen products
for the modern woman. The concept behind the idea is to show that Siemens
products are extremely advanced, and well ahead of the competition.
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| eyeon: What facility do you work for and what is your role? |
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Today I work as 2D compositor and 3D artist for a small but very versatile
post production studio. Most of the time we do film work, TV commercials and
lots of local TV station ID’s.
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| eyeon: Where did you first hear about Fusion and how long have you been using DF? |
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I first saw Fusion back in 1998 during a stint with a local post production
studio. They had just bought the software and I had no experience with a node-based compositing system before.
But it didn't take long before I started to
deliver finished commercials and, if I remember correctly, it was with version 1.5.
Ever since, Fusion has become my primary compositing software for TV,
film and print production.
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| eyeon: You work with both 3D and 2D apps. We know that you use Fusion for compositing, what
3D package do you use and how is the integration between DF and that package? |
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My main choice for all 3D work is LightWave, though I also use Maya for
filling some small gaps. Fusion is so flexible that any 3D project
can be boosted to get that hi-end look with minimal effort. In parallel to
this LightWave is the dream software for multi-pass rendering because it can
export any layer the user wants, exotic or not, in full 32bit floating point
format and Fusion is right there waiting for all those layers to turn
them into the finished product. There is not a single 3D frame I do nowadays that doesn’t
go through Fusion for minor or major tweaking. I can’t imagine how I
managed to get decent (cough....) 3D work before Fusion was around.
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| eyeon: What do you find most useful about Fusion? |
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Undoubtedly, it’s easy of use and allows one to approach compositing problems in a very straight forward manner. Besides that, the most useful
thing for me lately is the ability to use my small render farm of 9 RenderBoxx dual Xeon nodes through the network for real-time
rendering of the flow tools during compositing work. Fusion is fast, even
on a single workstation. Now, imagine having the horsepower of multiple workstations,
all in one, for your compositing needs. Yes, that's what I like about Fusion
most. It gives the term "real-time" a new definition.
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| eyeon: What unique compositing related issues/problems came up during production? |
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For the Siemens commercial there weren’t really any compositing issues. All went
smoothly, from the rendered passes from LightWave, to the multi-layer compositing
flows in Fusion. One issue came up for the last knitting robot shot where I had to change some surface properties of the robot's head. Since
I had only half a day to deliver the final shot, I re-rendered only the head of the robot in LightWave
and replaced the old head with the new one. But first I had to remove the old head,
because I had a transparent glass on it and to make sure that there wouldn't be any
edges visible when I composited the new head on top. This was trickier than it sounds, but still only a matter of minutes to figure out.
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| eyeon: What else have you worked on in the past? |
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A previous job I did that follows the same path - LightWave/Maya first, then Fusion was a shot for a feature film called A Touch of Spice from Village Roadshow. It was a full
CG shot of an Airbus type aircraft flying at high altitude through volumetric clouds. It was
rendered in 2K for film print, and since all was rendered in separate layers, Fusion
saved the day by adding that necessary interaction between the aircraft and the clouds in
the form of shadow casts, sun highlights, jet exhaust displacements and actual interaction between the right wing tip and a cloud.
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If you have completed an interesting project and would like to share it with the DF community, please contact us at  dfartist@eyeonline.com
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