Adding Elements in VFX Compositing to Sell the Illusion – A Step-by-Step Guide from Digby Hogan

MZed Education

by Mascha DeikovaJanuary 23^rd, 2026

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It’s the year 2026, and simple visual effects have quietly become a mandatory tool in every creator’s skillset. See for yourself! Nowadays, even Instagram reels with talking heads made by influencers include text animations, fancy transitions, and moving graphic elements. Sure enough, lots of them are simply using ready-made presets. So, if you’re a professional film and video maker, you need to be a step ahead and have more creative control in your hands. In other words, it’s good to know the basics of compositing and how to add elements to your VFX shot to make it look more real and convincing. Do these terms still ignite fear and insecurity in you? Worry not! After this article, they won’t.

Of course, we’re not talking about top-notch multi-million blockbaster-ready VFX, made by industry-leading companies like Weta FX. These effects require years of technical training and experience, alongside patience, talent, and masterful skills in a specific role. (If you want to know more about VFX jobs in general, head over to our comprehensive multi-part guide here, here, and here.)

No, here we look at something much simpler and more beginner-friendly. Namely, a step-by-step guide on how to add elements to your VFX shot to sell the illusion. This text is based on a lesson from Digby Hogan’s course “Get Me Started with Adobe After Effects – Compositing” on MZed.

If you want to watch the entire course, click here.

What makes a VFX scene feel real?

Imagine you have footage of a parachuter shot on a green screen. Your task is to make it look like they’re actually flying through the sky. That’s the example that seasoned filmmaker, editor, and educator Digby Hogan is using for the demonstration. Now, let’s say you’ve already removed the green screen using a Keylight 1.2 tool (find out how here), placed your subject on a different background, and even inserted some camera shake. The result is okay, yet not fully convincing at this stage.

When you reach this moment in compositing, and the basic shot is ready, Digby recommends watching it over and over again and asking yourself: What would make this scene feel more real? Your changes could be very subtle. However, it’s exactly these kinds of small adjustments (and lots of them!) that usually make the overall difference in good compositing.

For example, in the case of a parachuter, we can blur the background image of the sky a bit. In a real-life situation, the camera and the parachute would also be moving closer together and farther apart as they fall. So, by adding a few zoom-in and zoom-out moments, we can create this kind of motion. Yet the biggest magic often happens when we add a few distractions for the audience’s eye, elements that make the shot feel more layered and multi-dimensional. In our scenario, that could be something as simple as clouds moving quickly past.

Preparing elements for VFX compositing

As part of the course, Digby Hogan provides a pre-prepared folder of cloud assets that can be downloaded and used for the exercises. However, if you have a different shot to tackle, or you want to experience the whole process, you can easily find the required elements online or even make them yourself.

How? If you have a photo camera (or a good smartphone), you can go outside and simply capture images of the elements you need. Make sure you shoot righ-res – that’s important. Afterward, you’ll need to remove the background and save the images with a transparent background, for clouds also with partial transparency, usually in .png format or something similar. Adobe Photoshop, for example, offers a quick AI-based tool for this task, which works correctly in many cases.

Another way is to dive into the glorious depths of Google and search for assets. According to Digby, there is a surprising amount of free, good-quality material available once you start looking for suitable elements. Again, just make sure to look for images with high resolution. There is a filter in search settings that needs to be toggled on.

Placing and animating elements in VFX compositing

Once you have your assets ready and imported into your project folder, pick a favourite element to begin with and drag it down to your timeline as a top layer. Digby’s course focuses on Adobe After Effects, so the subsequent guide also demonstrates the workflow there.

If you need to resize the element, hit the shortcut key “S” to enable the scale settings, and drag the scale number up or down as needed. In our example, the cloud has to be bigger, so Digby scaled up by almost 500%.

The next step is animating the movement. In a real-life scenario, the clouds would be moving upward as the protagonist shoots through them with a parachute. In other scenes, it helps to think about the element’s speed and direction, and how that movement supports the shot.

For animation, we move our playhead to the start of the timeline, select the cloud track in the composition, and hit “P” to open the position parameter. After that, toggle on the clockwork icon pictured below. It will enable the keyframes.

Next, adjust the parameter until the cloud moves out of the frame. As a useful shortcut, holding Shift while dragging the parameter slider allows the values to change in larger increments. Okay, done. Then move the playhead to the end of the composition and adjust the values again so the cloud moves upward and disappears off the top of the frame. This automatically creates the second keyframe.

If we play the shot now, the cloud moves upward through the frame in front of the parachuter. It’s still far too slow and feels a bit heavy, but the effect is starting to come together.

Tricks to make the effect more convincing

For the effect to work, the motion needs to happen much faster, roughly ten times quicker. As Digby Hogan explains, the easiest way to achieve this is by reducing the distance between the keyframes. You can do this by selecting the second keyframe on the timeline and dragging it closer to the first. Repositioning keyframes also lets you shift the effect within the shot, so the element appears exactly when you need it to.

At the moment, the movement is still linear. Meaning: it starts abruptly, goes at the same pace, and then stops. However, to make it look smoother, Digby recommends adding a so-called “easy ease” to the keyframes. For that, select your keyframes on the timeline and press “F9“. Alternatively, right-click on them and choose “Keyframe Assistant” => “Easy Ease“. You will see that the default diamond-shaped symbols will change and look like this:

Play your shot now, and you will notice the difference.

Playing around with VFX compositing further

The effect already looks cool, but is it enough? Probably not. It helps to work with more cloud elements in different forms, sizes, and levels of blur and opacity. Some can be thinner, others denser, with a few placed behind the talent. Digby Hogan demonstrates this approach in the course. One straightforward method is to duplicate the existing cloud animation by selecting the cloud layer and pressing Cmd+D (or Ctrl+D on Windows), then dragging the duplicated layer below the parachuter footage on the timeline. It also makes sense to scale the cloud down, as it’s farther away from the camera. Maybe also change the position of its keyframes slightly, so that the two clouds have a short delay between them.

From here on, it’s a matter of personal preference. You can experiment, add more elements, vary the animation, and combine layers in different ways. The key is to let your eye guide you, while keeping one question in mind as you work: how would this behave in the real world? Using that as a reference point helps the shot feel increasingly convincing.

What else can you learn with MZed Pro?

With MZed Pro, you can stream hundreds of hours of filmmaking education. We continually add new courses (several are currently in production). Starting at just $29/month (billed at $349 in the first year, $199 from the second year, or billed monthly at $49), here’s what you’ll get:

• 60+ courses, over 800+ high-quality lessons.
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What about you? Do you have ideas for basic VFX that you’ve always wanted to try out? Which elements could you imagine adding to your shot to sell the illusion? Please leave your comments and examples below!

Feature image source: a collage from stills and assets by Digby Hogan / MZed.