VISUAL EFFECTS SUPERVISOR / VISUAL EFFECTS

I was brought on to supervise and then implement the visual effects for an episode of an ongoing sketch series for Comedy Central that features different YouTube influencers and focuses on their “gimmick”. King Vader is a YouTube influencer who utilizes home-grown visual effects to make fun sci-fi and anime-inspired shorts. The shoot was done entirely in one (freezing cold) day on location in an actual funeral home, so there was little time to film things “right”. As such, I was responsible for quickly adapting on the fly how to most efficiently capture the visual effects shots and necessary plates in ways that would be speedy for the crew to set up and break down.

Fortunately it was established up front that the visual effects should replicate the style in King Vader’s videos. This was license to flood the screen with lens flares which operate as a convenient cloak for integrating quick and dirty effects despite being egregious and not particularly corresponding to how the real light sources would be seen in camera (I was actually asked to pump them up even more than my original, already excessive, implementation). But since there was a dozen or so effects shots that needed to be created from ground up within a week of filming, a cheat that doubles as stylistic matching device was welcome.

During the filming, when one of our actresses was lying in a coffin for the ending gag, the proprietor of the funeral home peaked her head in. She saw our actress in the coffin and loudly declared with a laugh: “Oh man, I’ve been there before. Let me tell you!” before disappearing back into the bowels of the funeral home. We all laughed amicably at the time but I find myself sometimes awake at night thinking back on that comment and wondering what she could possibly have meant...