War of the Worlds is a found footage short film based on the novel by H.G. Wells which I made for my final project at University.

I used Nuke for the compositing, Houdini for the simulations, Blender for the modelling and animation, Substance Painter for the texturing and Davinci Resolve for the editing and colour grading.

The compositing was by far the hardest part of this project and presented some very difficult challenges. One big challenge was the motion of the shots. Since the camera was a character, it was right in the action with everyone else. This meant the camera motion had to be shaky and fast and ended up resulting in a lot of motion blur as well. This wasn’t ideal since these shots needed to be camera tracked (which involves a computer algorithm looking for point of high contrast and detail and tracking them for the duration of the shot). Since the motion blur gets rid of those details, it made tracking almost impossible. I had to manually track a couple of shots and for some I could get away with a 2D track since it was far away enough to not have much parallax.