For as long as she can remember, Suzanne Jandu loved drawing and animation. “In university, I saw lots of 3D stuff appearing everywhere, and I was fascinated. I wanted to know how it was done. I had a friend who showed me something that he had made, a 3D logo, and I thought, even though it is just a logo, it’s amazing and I want to learn how to do that. So, when I graduated, I went back to college to learn how to do it,” says the lead compositor from Moving Picture Company (MPC).
In India as a guest speaker at the recently-concluded The Foundry India Road Show 2016 in Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai, she shared her experiences of working in The Jungle Book and overcoming complex creative and technical challenges through expertise and technology. Her IMDb page shows she has also been part of movies such as Harry Potter , Exodus: Gods and Kings , Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time , Guardians of the Galaxy and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory .
“I was born in London but grew up in Canada. After college, I got a job working on children’s TV shows, and then moved to Montreal to work on some features and Discovery Channel projects. In 2003, I took the plunge and moved to London to try working on bigger films, and within a month, I’d got a job,” says Suzanne, of her journey.
For those who don’t know much about the animation and VFX industry, Suzanne describes her job of lead compositor as “moving photoshop”. She uses a program called NUKE, made by The Foundry, a creative software company that makes visual effects and 3D content for the design, visualisation and entertainment industries. “Compositors are at the end of the pipeline; we have animators, texture artists, the lighting department... Once everything is created in the computer and rendered, it comes to me. For example, in The Jungle Book , I take Mowgli on a blue screen and I remove the blue screen with NUKE. Behind it, I put in the jungle or animals.”
With virtual reality (VR) set to be the next big thing, Suzanne expects that it will greatly affect the working of her department, “Because we are going to be the people putting together all the different footage. Right now, we film with one or two cameras. But VR needs 16 cameras: you’re basically looking up, down, to the sides... You can move your head wherever you want.”
But how feasible is it in terms of infrastructure and expense on a large scale? “It’s already happening,” she says, adding, “Directors are already getting really excited about being able to film VR. Technically too, software has already been created to stitch together frames. With all these different cameras, somebody or something has to put all of the footage, colours, plates and lines, everything together. The Foundry has already created something to do this, so you’re not manually doing it.”
Suzanne talks about how her industry has so many opportunities for those looking for a job.
“Especially in India, it’s probably the best job they could look for. For example, at MPC, we just finished working on a movie called Passengers . In London, we did 244 shots, but in Bangalore, we did 810. So, we have a lot of work coming to India. There are so many Bollywood films, and all the companies here are using NUKE as well. So, I would say keep drawing, keep painting, and if you’re an aspiring artist, it’s an excellent dream to have.”
