The Dr. Strange MOE (Main on End) was quite a challenging project both creatively and technically. Due to the tight turn-around we pushed a lot of the coloring workflows into Nuke. This meant we were dealing with tens of matte passes in some scripts. I was primarily tasked with developing solutions for composite to address creative and technical aspects of production.

One of the scripts I had the most fun developing was called shuffle mania. It's main focus was to aid in shuffling out the compositing passes from C4D into reuseable channels. Before R18, C4d would prefix numbers before it's passes (ie 004_), however those prefix numbers would change based on the order they were added, and updated! "001_Diffuse" may be "009_Diffuse" the next time the scene rendered. This presented a big issue with re-comping the beauty, causing all of the shuffle nodes to become void. Enter Shuffle Mania! It would remove the 004_ prefix and create another channel called "diffuse" or "specular" or "reflection", etc. Thus if the render pass name did shift, re-running the script would automagically reconnect the layer name with the approprite render pass.

For a great in-depth article on other aspects of production, check out Art of the Title's article.

• Production :

  Sarofsky Corp

• Lead Creative :

  Erin Sarofsky

• Executive Producer :

  Steven Anderson

• Producer :

  Sam Clark

• CG Supervisor :

  John Filipkowski

• Visual Effects Supervisor :

  Matther Crnich

• Smoke Artist/CG Artist :

  Cory Davis

• Senior Designer :

  Duarte Elvas

• Smoke Assistant :

  Erik Uy

• CG Artists :

  Andrez Aguayo, Brent Austin, Chris Beers, Patrick Coleman, Jon Jamison, Alex Kline, Zach Landua, Jeff McBride, Nathan Matsuda, Anthony Morrelle, Dan Tiffany

• Designers :

  Josh Smiertka, Lizzi Stuart, Domico Watson, Tnaya Witmer