Working nights is werid. Your times are all screwed up. You shop in the middle of the night and you are going to work when most people are driving home. Good thing was I was were I wanted to be.

I was greeted by Phillip Hoffman. At this time Phillip was a coordinator. I filled out all the paperwork and was led up stairs to the comp closet. A narrow room which had a door on the far side that led to the art department. 4 cubicles lined the right wall and 3 desks on the left wall. I was to share a desk with Craig Mathieson. Craig is a really good compositor and wasn't afraid to make mistakes and laugh at them. Everyday I would come in and Craig was chuckling about something crazy yet obvious he had screwed up in some way. I wish he was around longer, I feel I didn't learn everything he had to offer. Jim was to my left. On the night shift. There was a group of painters that were brought on to help with the heavy paint work that needed to be done. Delores Pope, and two other artist I never saw again after the project was over and for the life of me cannot remember there names. Down the hall was a additional room that had the other compositors that were all on the day shift. Brad the lead compositor on the show help me get setup and showed me rush and how the network was setup. Also setup a e-mail account so I could communicate.

Phillip sent me my-first assignment. All you could get was a scratch removal. There was really hard, hard, medium and easy. There was smoke in almost every shot. Tanks and gun shots make a lots of smoke. To help speed things up we only worked on the right third of the frame. The scans were 4k but we worked on a 2k cropped image. If we needed other parts of the frame we could ask. We used a 2k playback machine called the framethrower that you could load your image sequence and play it back realtime.

There is a reason you start in paint and roto. This is some of the hardest compositing I have ever done.