CRAFT VFX SUPERVISORS
POST & VFX
NICK DAVIS
CREDITS The One and Only Ivan; King Arthur: Legend of the Sword; Edge of Tomorrow; Wrath of the Titans; Clash of the Titans; The Dark Knight; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Troy; Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
You have to quickly get into the mind of the director. Every movie and every director is different. And you need to learn whether they are the sort of director that wants to try and do everything practically with VFX the fallback, or are they somebody that wants the effects to be ground-breaking and you’re there to guide them through a new process that possibly no one has done before?
Often scripts leave huge holes and that is where we really get involved. It’ll say, “creature appears, there’s a massive battle and the hero wins.” You’ve got to interpret that. We work with pre viz teams, the director, the designer, sometimes with the DP if they’ve come on board, and you start really drilling down into the complex sequences? What is the sequence and how are we going to achieve it? Then you start identifying what to do practically and what the visual effects are going to do? We build every set virtually in Unreal, and then we’ll scout them with headsets, identify shots and angles and extensions and what the art department’s going to build and where we take over.
You have to figure out methodologies to get the director and crew involved. On The One and Only Ivan, half the movie was basically animated. We wanted to do it in a way that seamlessly blended the live action portion of the movie with the virtual side. We created tools and a virtual production pipeline that enabled the director and the DP to treat that half of the movie the same way they treated the practical part of the movie.
Directors really want to cut their whole movie, look at it, tweak it a bit, and then say, “Okay, I think I’m ready for you to start.” By which point the movie comes out in a week. It can’t work that way so there is a leap of faith. It’s not always the most fun bit for directors when they’ve got to start committing to cuts and edits. But we always work very closely with directors and editors all the way through post because they always want to change their mind. The cut is always evolving. And as much as we say to them, ‘once you turn sequences over, they’re locked’, nothing’s ever locked. But once you get enough things going, you get momentum.
It’s important to have a really good understanding of the filmmaking and storytelling process. You’re not just facilitating the making of effects. That’s important but, in an age when you’re doing projects with 1000 or 2000 shots, you’re touching a major part of every single shot, every sequence, and you’re helping all of those to go from the page to the finish, so you need a very rounded understanding of filmmaking.
You need to understand the technology and keep abreast with changing techniques. But it’s not just understanding the technology, it’s understanding how to best use it, and making sure that it is the right tool for the job and it’s best for the movie.
We’re always like the third wheel in an eternal love tryst with the director, because it starts out as a production designer, the director and yourself, and then that becomes the director, the DP and yourself and then it becomes the director and the editor and yourself. You’re always the bridesmaid. But that is part of the role.
Autumn 2021
televisual.com 37
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