This was published in the December 2006 issue of Digital Media World, and is a hacked together opinion piece about – oddly enough – the future of visual effects.
There is no denying that visual effects are becoming increasingly realistic and so completely integrated into today’s production processes, that it begs the question – where does production end, and the visual effect begin? The definitions have blurred, and they are getting blurrier. Are visual effects part of a production, or has what we know as the “visual effects process” become the new production pipeline? Visual effects (VFX), or more accurately, digital visual effects, are becoming a ubiquitous process. Depending on your point of view, they are being splintered and absorbed by different areas of the production; or – more likely – we are witnessing the infiltration of digital workflows into all aspects of production. The influence is pervasive. Pre-visualisation, or previz, is now common on commercials and features, with some directors not able to even leave their trailer without whole chunks of vision rendered onto the screen in greyscale (or in some cases full-bodied colour).
Although David Fincher and Bryan Singer are the poster boys of previz, you’d be hard pressed to find a major production that isn’t using it. In commercials, it is endemic (although starting the client/agency/production indecision earlier maybe a double-edged sword). Whichever way you see it, the significant issue is that animation – 3D animation – is being created very early in the production process. Most of this is handed off to on-set crews, and of course, used by the VFX crews as well.  Outside of Hollywood, previz is usually done by a VFX artists – but it is fast becoming it’s own affair – should it be called VFX? It is not just big-budget Hollywood flicks that are getting the digital treatment.
There are plenty examples in lower-budget films. For example, art departments now deal not only in CAD, but also Maya. I’ve participated in the eager swap of models and have seen the benefit of it. Magnificent set designs that would bring a production manager to their knees are worked and re-worked, until the only practical on set-piece is a door frame surrounded by green screens (the production manager will still complain about the green screens).  Even George Lucas has been banging on about lessons to be learned from digital-centric workflows, and the consequential end of the big-budget blockbuster. His point is that the age of the 200 million-dollar bullets-and-blow-up extravaganza is too much of a risk, being unpredictably profitable and in a way, undermined by the rise of digital technology. He says that digital technology should be used to lessen the expense of filmmaking rather than used to bloat the budget.
There are a couple of other factors that are having a resonating effect on digital workflows. Firstly, the risk in digital visual effects is being reduced. There are many mainstream packages available that can do sophisticated effects out of the box. These advances ripple out and influence production – not only in the accessibility of VFX solutions, but also in that the producers, directors and writers are becoming well-versed in how things are done. In fact, they probably have had an adolescent fiddle with digital manipulation on their laptops when nobody is looking. It’s no news that today’s audiences are much more FX saavy than ever before – home PC’s, digital cameras, and perhaps console games are partially the cause – but DVD extras are destroying the magic! The process of watching a film is far from the passive activity it used to be. The audience will actively look for VFX shots, relish them, or deconstruct them. In fact, they will occasionally attribute a shot to digital manipulation, when it has been shot for real.
But the deconstruction and demystification of digital effects has a benefit. Which is the disarming of the scourge of our industry – the practitioners of the “dark arts” of VFX. Maybe you know someone like this: they make whatever they are doing sound so complicated, in a way that is supposed to be completely unfathomable to others, supposedly to make the “conjurer” look infinitely clever. Nobody gets points for making things sound hard. Nor do they get points for bullshitting everyone within earshot. VFX is not hard, and although it relies on logic, you do not need a to write a thesis to create a solution to a shot. That is not to diminish the amazing and intricate work many people do behind the scenes. But I think what makes a great shot are hundreds of tiny, simple problems, all solved, and all presented at the one time. Combined, they are complicated, stripped down they are little harmless pieces: a jigsaw puzzle. It is true in the industry that those that are able to express solutions in a pragmatic way will do well.
Those that are able to do that with an understanding of the production process will do even better.  Where does all this lead? Well, we know that production is becoming increasingly digital. Pervasively so. But as crews are required to understand digital processes, digital practitioners, aka digital artists, are required to understand the production process in return. This isn’t just complimentary back-scratching reciprocation – it is a necessity. If you look at the various parts of the production process that are being “digitised”, the impetuous is for digital artists is to become as integrated into the process as possible. Digital effects are not simply the product of people sitting in front of monitors in dark rooms, and they never were. But now, it’s not a specialised unit feeding shots into the scanner, instead, the entire production process is coming to the party.
Some of the dark room antics will be diminished; some, more likely, will be increased. Case in point: there are five new digital cine cameras due for release (or revealing) into the market next year. The loudest of the bunch are Red, but don’t think that they are the only ones vying for a slice of the action: think ColorSpace, Drake, Silicon Imaging, and maybe Kinetta. You can guarantee that Arri, Thomson, Panavision and Sony, will be preparing for a little competition. If the computer industry is any measure hardware turnover, the camera manufacturers will be rubbing their hands together at the thought of all the upgrades. Additonally, all the rushes from those cameras are streams upon streams of digital data. Terabytes in a day. All of that needs to be logged and “processed”.
Although the pipeline will have parallels with analogue film, it will be different. You could languidly point to desktop publishing and the changes that ensued when it became commonplace, all of those years ago, as an example of how things might change. But I think we have already reached that point: anyone who doesn’t have a copy of After Effects, Final Cut Pro or equivalent please stand up. A more fitting example would be to look at the commercial photography industry. The changes there have been rapid and significant – and as with cinema – there were arguments about film and digital. They are not trivial differences, but digital acquisition has rapidly taken hold as the dominant way of shooting commercial stills. It would be hard to argue any different future for motion pictures. I think that digital processes can strip back some of the bloated aspects of “standard” production. However, digital can also introduce it’s own layers of fat too.
I’m not a starry eyed cheerleader for digital – and still think a piece of film gives you something digital can’t; and then there is the irritating tendency to overtrain on digital frames. But to look at it pragmatically, there is a major shift happening in the way we make films. As George Lucas reckons, this should lead to cheaper more efficiently produced movies, television, and for that matter, commercials.  We can see a clear convergence amongst all parts of the film production process.
More than ever, the concept of digital effects has moved from spaceships and explosions, to the process that determines much of the mise en scène. It is many parts of the traditional production process rolled into one. It is up to VFX artists to embrace production values, and keenly observe the how they develop. It may not be called “visual effects” in the future, but it will be very, very interesting.
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One of the implications of moving from film capture to digital capture is that images tend to have a different “depth” or “presence”. This is probably because of the way light scatters through layers of emulsion as opposed to the way it hits a cold, hard, digital sensor.
