MISUTA VFX

So here’s the “brains” behind Misuta VFX: “Misuta Nout”. Or “Andreas ‘Nout’ Schmidt”, if you’re not into those brevity things. I’ve been creating imagery all my life, be it behind a (film) camera, with pen, oil or ink, or using a computing machine. General nerdiness got me into the moving type of pictures, so I started with motion graphics and video editing. That was in 2002, good Lord. Since then I took practically every odd job in the production and post production chain that relates to this passion. And I’m still not done, no Sir (or Ma’am). More on that front over at the “PROFESSIONAL INFO” tab.

In regards to other (creative) endevours, I still film and edit – yet admittedly it’s mostly travel stuff and skate videos. I spend a lot of time putting my 3D skills to funky use. When I have enough of that, I write stuff and sometimes even publish it. But that’s a story for a different website. *cough*Rollkind.de*cough*

Young and bold as I was, in 2006 I quite my bank job, moved to Munich and started as an intern for the camera department at Bavaria Filmstudios. Any step that takes me closer to film production is a good step, I reasoned. After working on sets for quite a while I started interning in a film developing lab / post production facility, where I was swiftly promoted to, well, Trainee in the newly built “DigiLab”, which dealt with the digital intermediate post production workflows. Next to all sorts of odd jobs regarding scanning and printing and conforming and such, I was mastering DCPs of somewhat big films for national distribution. Biggest film titles were “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Buddenbrooks”, and next to that I mastered and distributed dozens and dozens of Trailers. Since this was a fairly new field in post production, it was a highly technical job that taught me all the ins and outs of digital signal processing.

Since Nuke was used for the colorspace transforms, I started to learn that darn program. Having created Animations and Short films in Premiere and After Effects for years by then, the switch to Nuke was… bringing me very close to insanity.
In any case, in late 2009 I jumped ship and moved to Berlin in order to start… well, “working with something to do with media”. Which essentially means turning into a useless slacker who taking every odd media job from camera assistant motion graphic designer. Hell, I even worked in Blocking, and that’s desperate.

In any case, my skills in Motion Design, Compositing, Editing and overseeing post workflows eventually qualified me for being the Post Supervisor (which included all the positions above) at a joint for commercials. Did that for a good while before the company went under and I was back on the streets as a freelance media man/douche.
With a new bag of tricks I landed some gigs doing more and more compositing for high profile commercials. Mostly car stuff.
So in 2016 I landed my next gig as employed Post Supervisor / Lead Compositor at another joint for commercials. Next to producing dozens of fairly high profile ads I was also in charge of establishing pipelines, workflows, managing teams and dealing with agencies and clients. I was also the Senior Online dude, putting the final strokes on every product.

That was fun enough, but in 2018 the freelance business seemed more and more enticing. So once again I went to being a creative gun-for-hire, and this time for good. Since then I’ve been working as a Compositor (eventually in Senior and Lead position), Post and VFX Supervisor, and also CG Generalist – thanks to Covid and the extra time for learning 3D softwares.

Throughout these years I got extensive knowledge of Nuke, Blender, Resolve, the whole Adobe suit although I came to detest it, and another fair dozen of various programs and addons to get the shows on track – including Unreal Engine, iClone etc etc.

So this is where we stand. Use me as a sort of swiss army tool to tackle practically all image related post duties. Of course, there’s some blind spots in my skillset. But before I put my mental and physical health but also the production itself on the line, I will communicate clearly what I can and cannot bring to the table prior to any booking. No-one likes bad surprises when the deadline looms, right.

MAIN TOOLS INCLUDE:

• NukeX (since version 5.14)
• Blender (since 2.8)
• Resolve (since v12)
• After Effects (since 7.0)
• Premiere (since 2.0)

SECONDARY TOOLS

• Unreal Engine
• iClone
• CharacterCreator

MAIN COMPOSITING SKILLS:

• Multi-Pass CG
• Set Extensions
• Clean-ups
• Keying (reluctantly)
• Roto (ugh… but ok.)

3D Skills

• Honestly: A bit of everything in order to get the show running, including:
  • Hard Surface Stuff
  • Character Creation and Animation (humanoid, at least)
  • Rigid body physic sims
  • Texturing / Lighting
  • Fixing meshes, UVs etc.