VFX supervisors, along with our team,
We are the magicians behind the scenes who make things happen, and make you hopefully
believe that a car is driving when it's not.
We get called the Swiss Army knife, because you have to wear many hats and
just smile all the way through.
Visual effects supervisors and VFX artists, we're all about making the impossible possible.
You can't fly a spaceship to a foreign planet and film a cheeseburger commercial.
It's just impossible at the moment, until Elon Musk figures it out.
We create a world that doesn't necessarily exist.
In the case of Carl's Junior and Call of Duty, I've created a futuristic world that looks
like a video game, yet you've got Charlotte McKinney eating a burger, and explosions,
and fighting robots.
You can kind of do anything with visual effects.
It really does allow you to travel to another world, or create the world where something
can happen that just is impossible.
The role of a VFX supervisor on set is kind of like an insurance policy in some way for
the project.
You're kind of there to make sure that any live action photography is being captured
in a way that isn't going to hinder the post-production process.
That's kind of where visual effects is kind of good at doing the invisible work where
you might look at something and think, "Oh, there's no visual effects," where in fact
there's a ton of stuff.
Some of the weirdest and wackiest shoots I've been on would be like a music video where
a very famous artist, who's married to a very famous rapper, would be dancing
and she had price tags on her earrings.
I know that sounds weird, but somebody didn't see that.
As visual effects, we come in and we get rid of that and no one will see it.
When Beyonce's camera ready you can't touch her.
When it comes to visual effects, there's many different flavors, shall we say.
There's the traditional 2D approach where you might be comping something into a different
background, kind of think of Photoshop where you've got a layer background and then a foreground
that you might have shot.
Then you've got Photoreal CGI, which is where you're trying to create a CG object, say a
car, that looks like it was actually there and that has reflections and is believable.
We're trying to trick the audience into thinking that something's real when it isn't.
Then there's the new generation of visual effects, which is the VR world, the AR world
where we have a whole new landscape to play with.
That landscape can be 360 degrees, or it can be me picking up my phone and
watching something happen on a tabletop.
Some of the common misconceptions about VFX are that we have a thing, which I still haven't
found yet, which is called the magic button.
The magic button will suddenly cut everything out, all the problems will go away, and everything
will just look perfect.
That isn't true.
To cut someone out, that is human labor and there is no magic button.
It's weird to have something that you're so close to for so long suddenly be out in the
world and everyone's watching it, and everyone's seeing it on their Instagram feed.
To this day, they follow me around the world.
I'll be on a plane and land in London, and you see the commercial you've worked on.
You're just like ... Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
Visual effects is everywhere.
It's here to stay.
It's always evolving, and it's kind of keeping up and pushing boundaries at all times.
Yes, the software will change, but making things look real will always be around.
That's it.
It's all about having the eye to do that, and just having the patience to get on with it.