VFX
CLOUD AND REMOTE WORKING
menaces to start targeting the VFX industry, he’s going to have to get a whole new stack of cards printed. Alongside Post, VFX has, as a whole, enthusiastically embraced the new flexibility that the pandemic- fuelled explosion in remote working and subsequent adoption of hybrid employment structures have given it. Hot desking means that Rees- Mogg might not find many vacant workstations to haunt, but he will find significantly less people around as the on-site two or three day week becomes the norm and increasing amounts of workers are now truly remote and strung out around the globe. The new normal has its issues of course. Managing disparate
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workforces, shifting security concerns, project management, maintaining corporate cultures, and the emergence of a truly globalised marketplace with truly global competition, are all concerns for the industry. But you cannot argue with the results. “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is a great example of
how successful and collaborative hybrid working can be,” says Lucy Killick, Chief Operating Officer, Film & Episodic for Framestore, pointing to the film’s stand-out 40-second continuous sequence of Strange and America Chavez tumbling through 20 separate, visually-distinct universes. “The amount of thought, detail, care and creativity that went into this kaleidoscopic moment was incredible, and it was also highly-iterative, with the scope and the work rapidly changing as ideas were expanded, scrapped or re-thought. This was creatively and technically challenging work, but also represented an almost ‘blank page’ approach in terms of what went into the mix. The fact that our VFX Supervisor, Alexis Wajsbrot, and his team could conceive, collaborate and deliver this work so successfully from home shows just what a strong place we’re in.”
WFH: WTF? Though they may all be in the same territory now, different companies were at different stages in the remote journey when the pandemic hit. At Framestore, Killick says that the highly-confidential nature of household- name client IP meant hybrid never seemed an option, whereas over at Jellyfish its remote operations pre-date Covid by several years. “The studio, the home, the beach, it makes no difference,” says MD,
Matthew Bristowe. “At the start of the pandemic we were at the start of a full feature, Spirit, for DreamWorks Animation, so we had to crew up massively. A lot of companies were actually scaling down at that time, but we increased our headcount to 350 from around maybe 60 or 70.” The result was a feature that encompassed around 2000 shots with
Jellyfish employing in 27 different countries all over the world from India to Africa to North America. “You have to adjust for timezones and the way that you review shots,
have technical support in different areas and more,” says Bristowe, but as Jellyfish CTO, Jeremy Smith, adds: “I really do think we’ve broken the camel’s back from the technical perspective. At this point it’s a case of refinement rather than having to deal with major technical issues.”
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televisual.com Summer 2022
n Whitehall, the heart of the UK’s civil service, government minister Jacob Rees-Mogg has been waging an increasingly futile campaign against what he sees as an insidious working from home culture. One of his recent tactics has seen him leaving a specially printed calling card on WFH civil servant’s desks, passively aggressively stating “Sorry you were out when I visited. I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon.”
If he ever ill-advisedly wants to expand his campaign of Victorian
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