I first met Tim Hey the second day I landed in Los Angeles – and when you meet someone who’s both humble and successful in the industry, you know you have a rarity. He stayed with Lori and I off-and-on a week or so, and, save for the mass shootings outside and a pension for lychee margaritas, it was fun.

Tim has been in the film industry now for nearly 20 years. First starting a Summer job at his local cinema tearing tickets and moving onto projectionist and engineer. About 9 years ago He decided he should do what he’d always wanted to do and play more of a part in making films. He went to the National Film and Television School in London to study compositing. After graduating, he got his first job on a film called Blade 2 doing prep work such as painting out wires and rigs that were in shots. Within a year he went freelance and started compositing. Between then and now he’s worked on such films as Harry Potter 2 and 3, Aliens vs Predator, Kingdom of Heaven and Superman Returns among many others. He then went to New Zealand initially for 3 months to work on King Kong, but that was 4 years ago, so I’m guessing he liked it.

…oh yeah, one last thing, he just got done working on a small-budget indie flick called ‘Avatar’ or something like that – be a peach and try to see it if you can.

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what exactly do you do?

I am a compositor at Weta Digital in New Zealand and have been for about 4 years.

what is a compositor?

A compositor is an artist who brings all elements together for a final shot. For example in “Avatar” we have shots with multiple layers of jungles, skies & clouds, creatures, explosions, water, tracer fire and of course the na’vi characters themselves. We then have to make it look as if the shot was filmed with the same camera on the same day. Along with all the elements we add real artifacts you would find if you were filming with real cameras. Lens flares, lens distortion, focus pulls and atmosphere are a few of the added things which make a shot look more natural.

For this project I was a lead compositor so in addition to compositing it was making sure everyone on my sequence was kept up to date with status of shots, ensuring continuity between shots by establishing the look of a sequence alongside the 3D lighters and visual effects supervisor. It also involves liaising with the supervisors and producers and check we were meeting deadlines and flagging any problematic issues that may come up.

how long does each of those frames take to process?

Depending on the amount of data used in the shot and how many elements are used, a single frame can take anywhere from an hour to a couple of days. If you remember there are 24 frames in 1 second that’s a lot of data. Added to that on “Avatar” each frame was rendered twice (right eye and left eye). Luckily the way we and a lot of other large visual effects companies process – or render – frames is we use multiple processors over a network. This leaves us free to do other work and proceed with other shots. Once a shot is rendered it is then reviewed by the visual effects supervisor for any changes that need to be made before the shot is sent to the director to be reviewed.

how long you been working on this?

I’ve been on the show for around a year. however the project has been running a lot longer. Some people at Weta Digital have been working on it 3 maybe 4 years. Because this is literally creating a whole new world, everything has to be built and nothing from the real world can be used. That’s every plant, blade of grass, creature, bug, character, environment, object and vehicle that has to be created from nothing. Usually a film from being awarded to being delivered takes between 6 months and a year at most so that kind of gives you an idea of the scale of Avatar and the work that has gone into it from all the artists involved.

be honest. what’s it like to work on a James Cameron film?

I think that’s the most common question I get. This director is pretty good to work for. What makes it easy from an artists point of view is he has a definite vision of how the whole film and every individual shot should look like. Therefore the artists aren’t bouncing between versions and various different looks which can take up valuable time. On “Avatar”, especially as the show went on, shots we delivered for first look usually only needed polishing and tweaking before the shot was near final status. There were a few occasions where we would show him a version of a shot a few months after he first saw it and he would remember exactly how it looked and what changes were made.

what, if any shots appear in the trailers that you composited?

For the teaser trailer that was released in August I had about 8 shots. Mostly of the Thanator chase in the jungle and Neytiri in the forest surrounded by fire and smoke.

how many people worked on “Avatar”?

We started with around 300 people which is the usual crew for Weta. As the show went on and more scenes were being sent to us from production we ramped up to a maximum of between 800 and 900. Put it this way, it was a heck of a wrap party!

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…at the time of writing, ‘Avatar’ netted $232 million on it’s first weekend. that’s a lot of money.