Which brings me to one of my only big issues with character interactions in TFA (I might write a full review some day but I need a second viewing) : they don't acknowledge Chewie's loss. When they get back on the Resistance planet, who comforts Leia? Rey. Who met everyone a few days ago. Chewie just walks by. It really felt wrong to me.

F.E.A.R. is such a great game. Definitely one of the FPS milestones as far as I'm concerned. The graphics still hold up pretty well because they brought at the time tons of new technologies we had seldom seen before: dynamic lighting, parallax mapping, etc. The AI is amazing and makes gunfights incredibly satisfying.

The atmosphere is what I remember the most however. The industrial and administrative locations the game takes place in are bleak as can be (the dynamic lighting adding a lot to it because it creates these sharp shadows) and pave the way for downright creepy moments. The game cleverly alternates between down-to-earth parts and completely surreal, mad visions where you see the little girl creeping in a corner and tiles levitating; the sound design helps a lot with tinnitus sounds and the like that really make you feel you're cast in this helpless complete dementia episode that lasts only a few seconds but you know will be back later on. It has its jump scare moments but they're not that many and the game relies more on setting your uneasiness efficiently (much like what would do Amnesia: The Dark Descent a few years later in a more extreme way), so much so that I'd be relieved when I saw enemy soldiers because I knew it would be a gunfight moment without creepiness (well...most of the time anyway). The story is very interesting because it focuses on discovering who's this little girl and the charismatic man-eating dude you see ripping your fellow soldiers apart but doesn't seem interested in doing the same to you for some reason.

Really a game worth checking out, and while I would agree with Boter on the expansion Perseus Mandate and the two sequels, I think Extraction Point is really great and takes the visual horror to a whole new level (as well as expanding the story that was later stated as non-cannon, but no one cares about the sequels).

I don't really get where you come from about the Holocaust and the misogyny. The dictator is a very effective metaphor for Pink's self-hatred and guilt. It's evidently blown out of proportion, but it completely makes sense since it's Pink's final descent into complete madness. Ever been so angry with yourself you started thinking how awful a person you were? Here we're talking about someone who's lost everything in his life because of himself, but ultimately because of the traumatic events throughout his life that damaged his personality and made him slowly unable to have interactions with other people (a wall built brick by brick between him and everyone else). Everything about it makes sense, including the misogyny I'm guessing you got from Young Lust and the whole arc with his wife, which is exactly what you'd expect from someone who starts their adult life socially damaged, the rock star fame only aggravating it.

Although dramatized, I find this album really easy to relate to, especially since major parts of it were inspired by Roger Waters' life (who among other things lost his father gone to war as a child - no wonder he's been an active anti-war activist for decades). It really makes you think about the importance of events in your life and how you can gain perspective by analyzing them and yourself.

I completely agree about the film though, and I think it's a miracle that it existed in the first place since it was developed at the peak of Waters and Gilmour's differences (which would lead to Waters ultimately leaving Pink Floyd). Alan Parker notoriously had great difficulties working with Waters as well. And yet we got this amazingly disturbing piece. The animations combine perfectly with the music to create a living nightmare that stayed with me for a long time after I was done watching it.

I thought the plastic thing in the foreground was Bateman's blood-soaked raincoat from American Psycho. Eh.

*looks at writers*

*no Lindelof*

I might give it a chance.

Short answer: there's no king. Or actually, there are two kings who rule over two different kingdoms.

Nuke is way more powerful at doing compositing than AE is. It doesn't mean you can't comp with AE (just ask Teague, and AE has been around for compositing artists much longer than Nuke has), but Nuke has some very powerful tools AE just can't compete with - 3D tracking with an actual 3D space, for instance.

The thing is that Nuke gives you free rein to anything you might want to do. It gives you nodes that do specific things, and then you're free to combine them however the hell you want.

See, Nuke is not about applying effects to a single image you have right before your eyes. What happens is that certain nodes will create certain channels - for example, your plate is going to create R, G, and B channels. And then these channels will flow through the node tree connected to the plate, and each node they pass through will modify them - if said nodes are meant to modify RGB channels. Some nodes, such as the keying nodes, will create more channels; in this case, an alpha channel. This alpha will contain black and white information that has no effect whatsoever on the RGB channels until you decide so. Most nodes, such as the Blur node (which does exactly what you're guessing it does) operate on the channels you have specified. So I can use it to blur my image as well as blurring an alpha.

The way I see it is that AE is better when you quickly need visual results, while Nuke has a more scientific, precise approach to it. You'll do stuff with nodes for hours without even taking a look at the final result. Working cleanly is more important than working quickly.

In conclusion, the best possible configuration is to have both, because they're complementary. If that's not possible, then choose the one that's more relevant in your particular case. There's no general rule here.

In Tom's case, I'd stick with AE. The compositing work you need isn't very complicated, but you do need to be able to create visual effects that pertain more - as you said - to motion graphics.

Me, I could never have done the complex compositing work I did for my graduation film with AE only. But I couldn't have done all the motion graphics work with Nuke only either. So I genuinely needed both.