Make cinematic VFX films without a studio behind you.
A complete system for planning, shooting, and finishing hybrid live-action and CG films with a small crew and a small budget. Every lesson comes from real shots on real productions.
Blender
Nuke
ComfyUI
In a traditional pipeline these are four different chairs, four different departments — and the seams between them are where projects slow down.
This course creates a Full Stack Filmmaker — a new kind of generalist that bridges these four skillsets.
Every module was tested on real productions. You learn from the shots, not from slides.
Your Instructor
Alex is a Senior Compositor with experience on numerous feature films. He has worked at top VFX studios worldwide, including Weta Digital, Industrial Light & Magic, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and more.
The Live-Action Bridge: every stage of a VFX film, from the plan to the final pixel, carried by one person who understands how each stage feeds the next.
This course isn't about modeling, texturing, or simulating FX. All four roles share one job — deciding the framing, composition, and storytelling of the shot.
With real understanding across all four disciplines, you orchestrate the shot — you don't have to build every piece yourself.
* Generated assets still have real limits today. They can't do everything, and we map exactly where they deliver and where they break down.
Here's the map of the course. Each module lists a few of its lessons so you can see the territory it covers. The full breakdowns, exact setups, and case studies live inside.
Shoot greenscreen that keys cleanly, tracks reliably, and matches CG environments, including the shots people say you can't do on green.
Previs and on-set planning workflows that kill expensive surprises. Scan your space, measure your set, and know a shot works before you roll.
The core of the framework: shot design, lighting design, and production design decisions that make cheap shots read expensive, studied through well-known films and our own productions.
The complete end-to-end pipeline: previs, filming, tracking, scene alignment, lighting, compositing, and final render. Walked through on real shots, start to finish.
Make virtual cameras move like they're held by a human with taste, and extend real camera moves into CG space so nobody can tell where the set ended.
The unglamorous layer that decides whether your film ships: file management, render speed, and working around slow tooling instead of waiting for it.
When existing tooling was too slow or didn't exist, we built our own. These are the same tools used to finish our productions, and they come with the course.
Fast image planes, camera path helpers, proxy playback for heavy previs scenes, and virtual camera workflow add-ons.
Spot grading, object blending, projection tools, and LOD proxy management for building large environments that stay fast.
GPU-accelerated relighting and a set of compositing nodes that turn the slowest parts of hybrid work into quick, controllable steps.
Automated read and write setups, script management, EXR export helpers, and the glue that keeps a solo pipeline organized.
The full bridge scales with you. Deliver an entire project solo, then use the exact same skills to build and direct a small team when the work demands it. Fewer people, lower cost, and output that punches well above your weight.
The skillset stays constant — only the crew scales
Once you can ship complete projects on your own, you choose how to grow — in whichever direction the work demands.
Keep the full overview, then sharpen a single craft until it's a genuine signature strength.
Bring in other artists and lead bigger, more ambitious productions as the work gets more complex.
Every budget level has its own strategy. You don't need money to start. You need to know what your current level can and can't buy, and how to punch one level above it.
Design projects around what already exists. Keep VFX-heavy work to a few hero shots. Make one shot film-level before attempting a film.
$0 to pocket moneyFind collaborators with adjacent skills who share the upside. Outsource only the brutally time-intensive work.
A few thousandIf you can film, supervise, do 3D layout, light, and comp yourself, you save tens of thousands. You only pay for assets, actors, and animation.
$10K to $15KThe same decision framework scales up. The judgment you build at level 1 is what keeps a real budget from evaporating.
$50K to $10M+The course focuses on levels 0 to 4: getting level-5 results before you have a level-5 budget.
Pre-order the Full Stack Filmmaker Framework™ now and get early access benefits that won't be part of the regular release.
Lifetime access · All future updates included
Pre-orders are for a course in active development; curriculum may be refined before release.
You need beginner knowledge of Nuke, which is covered in our Nuke Beginner Series.
Beginner knowledge of Blender is also required, and you can get it for free on YouTube. We aren't focusing on modeling or texturing every object from scratch. We use Blender for world assembly, lighting, and materials. If you're comfortable placing objects, setting keyframes, lighting, working with basic shaders, and rendering an image, you can take this course. A few hours of free YouTube Blender tutorials (4 to 5 hours) and you'd be ready.
No. ComfyUI is optional in this course, but we'll show some examples of how it can be useful if you want to use it. Some productions prevent generated assets from being used, so it's not core to this Framework.
For those examples we use ComfyUI Cloud, which is very simple, and we also show RunwayML as an alternative. Both interfaces are simple, and the workflows you actually need don't require over-complicated ComfyUI graphs.
ComfyUI Cloud does require credits, which may run $10 to 15 if you want to generate with it.
We use Beeble to generate normals. If you want to relight your own footage, you'll need a Beeble subscription for a month. However, if you just want to follow this course, you don't need to subscribe, as we provide the final output passes you need to practice with.
Primarily no. We have many other compositing courses to learn from. This is a broad overview of crossing the production bridge from end to end so you can create your own projects. We solve bottlenecks at each stage, give you a custom pipeline and tools, and show the main strategies for building shots. We don't cover basics such as camera tracking or greenscreen removal (those are covered in the Nuke Beginner Series).
As bonus content, there will be an overview of some shots from The Rider covering how they were built up in Nuke, for those interested in the compositing side specifically. This is not compositing the project from scratch, as that isn't the purpose of this course.
There is email support related to the course content, but we can't consult on or supervise your personal projects. If the question is directly related to the content as it applies to the examples in the course, support is available.
We'll be uploading the tools, pipeline, and assets over the coming weeks (ETA early August) for pre-order members.
The course provides the hero shot assets from The Rider project: greenscreen plate, lava terrains, vehicle, and HDRI. The Rider is the hero project of this course. For example, we'll practice on some of the greenscreen shots from The Rider and round-trip them across the production pipeline.
We'll look at examples from the other productions shown above in relation to concepts applied on those productions, but those shot assets are not part of this course. They provide additional context on how the same principles apply to many different shots, and how you'll apply them to your own projects.
No. The course is in active development, so module structure and lesson order may be refined as we reach near or finish production.
We deep dive on a variety of techniques to control cost in visual effects and filmmaking. You can't create your own projects without understanding cost deeply, and there are many strategies (infrastructure, tooling, CG, filmmaking) that help you achieve high-level results.
The objective is to make your projects always look higher budget than what you actually have, so you build portfolio pieces you can leverage into the future.
This framework is meant to work whether you're a solo artist using just Blender and Nuke, or you have a budget to assemble a team.
We explore strategies for each level to make projects come to fruition, and collaboration approaches for achieving output even with very little budget.
This course is primarily aimed at integrating actors on greenscreen into virtual environments, shooting the footage properly, and kitbashing and blending CG environments. CG integration (a CG object over live-action footage) is not the primary goal.
However, many of the same techniques are used in CG integration projects. This course is extremely useful even if you want to do CG integration afterwards. The scanning techniques, footage processing, creative and technical workarounds, and custom pipeline tools are all relevant and necessary.
Many principles in this course are also useful for Blender to Nuke workflows, including full CG shots. The goal with Full Stack Filmmakers is that you can work in live-action, full CG, or anything in between. Integrating live-action will also teach you important parts of full CG shots along the way.
If you want to make your own projects with live-action footage, yes, you need a camera. Whatever you have can work, even if it's just an iPhone.
You can still complete this course without a camera, but the goal is to help you understand principles so you can go make your own projects with one.
We don't offer refunds once you've purchased, as you have immediate access to the digital content we've created.