Cinematography for VSFX
Course Name: Cinematography for VSFX
Instructor: Patrick Murphy
Quarter: Fall 25
Keywords: Pratical FX, Green Screen, Lighting, Nuke, Compositing
Date Updated: Jan 29, 2026
In this cinematography class, I teamed up with my classmates to explore practical effects, camera operation, lighting, greenscreen, and compositing. Working side by side with filmmakers and VFX artists pushed me to communicate more clearly, plan more intentionally, and ultimately make stronger images. One thing I didn’t fully understand at the time, though, was how critical it is to document the process and capture solid behind-the-scenes material. Now that I do, I treat BTS as part of the work—not an afterthought—and I make sure that lesson sticks going forward.
Forced Perspective
Credits:
Director/Ideation: Tohyo Jiang
Actor: Yunzhen Liu
PA: Christopher Perez, Zach Breene
The Miniature Illusion
Forced perspective is an optical illusion technique that manipulates human perception to make objects appear larger, smaller, closer, or farther away than they actually are. By carefully aligning objects at different distances along the camera's Z-axis, this method creates compelling, in-camera, real-world scenes without complex digital editing, frequently used in photography, film, and architecture.
I found this cute pig miniature in a local game shop. I thought it would be fun to use it for the forced perspective assignment.
TWin / doppelganger
Credits:
Script: Christopher Perez
Actor: Lin Liu
Camera/Lighting: Christopher Perez, Tohyo Jiang, Yiwei Wang
A BTS video of our crew preparing the camera and lighting setup in my apartment, the shooting location. My cat Milo is the on-set supervisor watching over us.
Green Screen / MAtch lighting
Credits:
Actor: Zach Greene
Camera: Tohyo Jiang
Compositing: Tohyo Jiang
PA: Anushree Gupta, Cora Jing, Qing Liu.
We shot this scene at an empty classroom. On top left of the shot you could see there’s a long stripe lamp that projects straight up to a reflecting surface that creates tons of indirect bounce light in the room. I underestimated the difficulty of replicating this lighting set-up. Our green screen stage is not that high for us to set up light and to have a reflection board above it. We had to come up with other ways to try to mimic this lighting setup, though not perfect.
Actor Replacement
Credits:
Actress:
Camera: Tohyo Jiang
Compositing: Yijia Che
PA: Anushree Gupta, Cora Jing, Yijia Che
For this actor replacement assignment, I have a better understanding of what works for our setup. I chose this indoor scene from the movie Oppenheimer. The main lighting source is the window lights, with a moderate amount of bounce light coming from the wall. Possibily, there’s an additional rim light that lights the silhouette of the face.
What I learned in this assignment is that some lighting setups are optimized for specific actors or actress. Their facial structure could be best presented under certain lighting, and the same setup might not work for other actors and actress. Also, costumes matters. The various textures and materials of the constumes could alter how light react to it, thus in a certain degree change how the scene and the character lookds.
Acting…
In this class, we were encouraged to work with different people and act in one another’s films. I was the actor in a few projects and I was observing how other classmates approach the same prompt we were given. Here are some of the goofy moments I have on sets…
Here’s a forced perspective scene by my classmates Christopher Perez with me acting in it.
