Love it or hate it, CGI and digital compositing are here to stay. I think you’d actually be surprised at how much of it is used without you even realizing and for this reason it’s something which you should be open to embracing to enhance your video and photography work.

We’ve all see people abuse various techniques such as HDR photography to produce unappealing and unrealistic work. CGI and digital compositing are no different and when performed badly, they have a negative effect and can give certain practices a bad name. Thankfully, there are many instances of people doing it right and one great example of this is the work of David Fincher. KaptainKristian over on his YouTube channel has just created this fascinating look into some of Fincher’s movies and explores how he uses these methods so successfully.

Kristian goes on to explain how Fincher’s visual effects are always in service of the story; They are not there to be recognized, they are not there to impress, they are there to immerse the viewer. These are all the right reasons for using CGI and digital compositing and when done correctly they really do add so much depth.

These techniques are not exclusive to major Hollywood movies either as I recently discussed in my article showing how to composite realistic flames into your photography work. With a little bit of time and effort, you too could be adding the extra dimensions which Fincher does to his masterpieces. Just make sure you don’t crank those effects all the way up to 11!