Dragon Club - DreamWorks' Dragons The Nine Realms

Screens in screens on screen- lots of screens!

Unavoidable in the modern world, screens can present unique challenges to animation compositing. For long shots like this, the picture-in-picture (PIP from here on out) is a separate Nuke script that has to be timed correctly with the animatic and the provided animation. Often, I would be given a still overlay and have to add animation to it that matched the animatic to achieve the desired shot, as seen on Alex's screen where an overlay pops up a certain way, then zeroes in on a certain part of the shot before zooming in. All that was animated in comp.

Occasionally, I'd have to STMap screens myself if a UV was not provided for them, and there was never a nice 1:1 so adjustments needed to be made on the fly.

The static look established on screens in this early episode was then carried throughout the series, as there is much technology- and therefore, much PIP. Working through different test variations and executing feedback is always fun, but sometimes it can be hard to explain the differences in specific small changes to static...especially when you've been working with and staring at that static for a week. Or two.

Or three.