Runner
When searching for VFX runner online, every company or employer would say, it is a good start for those who have a passion for VFX industry and would like to work in the industry in the future. Runners are always in demand in production management department.
Runners will get to know every inch of the VFX departments and get unique insight into how everything works. What’s more, runners should know a wide cross-section of the stuff among the departments.
Here are examples that the responsibilities a runner would take when working in VFX and the qualities companies may value when they are looking for VFX runners.
Overall, runner is a great job for entering the VFX industry. It does not require really hard technical skills or rich working experiences. When applying for this job, apart from showing the intense passion for the work, it would be great to add examples of the vigilance and diligence required in running work in the covering letter.
Prep artist
Prep artist clean up the background of live action-footage, to allow other compositors to integrate all the elements of the image to create film visual effects shots afterwards. They remove unwanted items from the plates, such as brands, advertisements, wires, cameras and so on. By doing this, they give good and clean footages to the next person, which may be roto artist.
These two pictures show an example of what a prep artist does. For further examples, I found a video, it contains different examples of the result of the clean up.
Here is an example what responsibilities a prep artist should take when working.
The responsibilities may vary from different companies, but the basic skills the prep artist should have is rig removals, painting our markers, wires and other imperfections.
People who apply for the job should also have good technical skills in Nuke, some may ask for Maya and Photoshop. Experiences in working in the VFX industry are always appreciated by those companies.
Prep artists are always working with roto artists, so having some knowledge about roto may always helps.
Roto artist
Roto artists draw around and cut out objects, moving items or actors in live-action frames. By doing this, those moving items can be separated from the frames, which becomes a new layer. Therefore, those cut out images can be combined with other live-action images, or CG images and so on. Roto artists help to cut required parts out from moving frames.
This job is about editing with every frame needed in the film, so roto artists need to be really patient, careful and pay attention to details. The job sometimes can be really boring and requires hard work.
I have also noticed that some companies may combine this job with paint artist. Which means the roto artist should also know how to remove items like wires, rigs or tracking markers.
In the early days, roto artists had to manually trace on each frame, however, thanks to the technology, much time have been saving now.
Here are the software and tools needed for being a roto artists, along with required skills.
Examples of roto demoreel and showreel below: