WORKING SMART

I was the only compositor on the show for almost the entire second season, which presented some challenges in maintaining the shows visual style along with hitting our deadlines. To ensure my time was well spent, I created a number of pipeline scripts to greatly speed up time-consuming workflow and compositing tasks.

Adobe Animate scripts

The first script added a two digit number prefix to all Animate layer names from top to bottom, ensuring the correct layer order is quickly determined when imported into After Effects. I then adapted a pre-existing Animate script to export these layers into separate SWF files

Adobe After Effects scripts

I made a 'Rename' script which took the imported SWFs and automatically added the episode number and scene prefix to their file name, which was a workflow requirement. The script parsed this information from the name of the original file and its location on the server.

A 'Setup' script automatically took the selected SWFs, moved them into an asset folder inside of After Effects, placed them in a new composition, arranged the layers in the correct order (thanks to my first prefix number script in Animate), scaled them to the correct frame size, turned on 'Continuous Rasterization', and trimmed the composition to the SWF length. While none of these actions are time consuming in their own right, they add up over the course of a single day, let alone an entire season!