The UK is a magnet for directors seeking the highest quality visual and special effects but it's been a success story four decades in the making.
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For
the first time, this year, UK expertise dominated the Academy Awards
for Visual Effects. Double Negative and Milk won for Ex
Machina, beating Cinesite (The
Revenant) and MPC and Framestore
(assisted by The Senate), for The Martian.
Another nominee, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, was
supervised by British artists
stationed at ILM London and included the practical effects prowess of
Chris Corbould [see sidebox].
Far
from a fluke, home-grown vendors have headed four of the previous
nine VFX Oscar winners. The trail blazed by Framestore, on The
Golden Compass (2007), continued
with lead VFX responsibility by Dneg for Christopher Nolan's
Inception (2010), Gravity (2014,
Framestore) and Interstellar
(2015, Dneg again).
“One
of the benefits of the UK is that we are collectively very
integrated,” says William Sargent, Framestore CEO and co-founder.
“Foreign directors rely on British crews, from carpenters to VFX
artists, because UK craft teams exhibit lateral thinking and
collaborate as a very cohesive unit. Quite simply, studio executives,
directors and DPs like working here.”
It
was London's status as a European centre for producing commercials in
the early 1990s that incubated the first visual effects businesses.
The Mill, Cinesite, Framestore and MPC (Moving Picture Company)
became involved in film VFX as optical techniques were replaced by
digital technologies.
“The
approach to the work remained the same as these companies moved from
VFX for commercials into VFX for features,” says Cinesite, MD,
Antony Hunt. “Focused on innovation and creative excellence, on
very high end technical accompishment, and importantly, on businesses
that were well managed and financially responsible,”
The
Mill signalled Soho's arrival on the international scene with
Britain's first VFX Oscar for Gladiator
in 2000, but unarguably the moment that reshaped the landscape was
Warner Bros' decision to produce the Harry Potter franchise on UK
shores. This underpinned the industry and showcased the abilities of
British artists to Hollywood.
“The
local VFX industry went from being peripheral to really becoming a
global centre,” says Alex Hope, who founded Double Negative with
several MPC colleagues in 1998.
“What
was a cottage industry at the start of Harry Potter was fully grown
up a decade later,” confirms Milk, CEO, Will Cohen.
The
impetus snowballed with the introduction of tax breaks, beginning in
2005, which further incentivised overseas producers to place more of
their production budget in the UK. In 2015 some £1.4 billion was
spent on feature films here, a staggering 83% of which was inward
investment, helping propel the value of the UK's creative industries
to £84 billion ($119bn).
“There
is a tendancy to panic about where the next tax break is coming from
but even if places like Canada emerge as a centre of excellence you
can't replicate the organic growth of the UK overnight,” says
Cohen. “The UK is very stong in creative and digital industries.”
For
example, the compositing systems which became the defacto standard
for digital graphics in the 1990s were developed by British firm
Quantel. Geography has played its part too, in particular the unique
tight knit film community of Soho.
“The
proximity of rivals within walking distance has helped to keep
expertise and innovation at a high level and means ideas and skills
evolve fast,” says Hope. “All of us compete fiercely for work but
once awarded we all ensure the project comes first. That's a hallmark
of British VFX culture and fundamental to its growth.”
“We
aren't afraid of stabbing each other in the back but we also club
together and understand that anything coming to the UK is good for
everyone,” says Lucy Ainsworth-Taylor, MD and founder, Bluebolt.
In
the itinerant life of a VFX artist, where lead supervisors and senior
animators chase jobs from Montreal to Sydney to LA, the prospect of
setting down roots in a capital where work is plentiful proved too
good to miss. Studios also gain in the knowledge that freelance
talent is not dissipating after a major production but staying put.
This
is increasingly valuable as the complexity and scale of productions
has rocketed. Where Gladiator
contained less than 100 VFX shots, Star Wars: The Force
Awakens featured 2100, a volume
which is fast becoming routine for tentpole titles.
“VFX
tends to refer to the very visually obvious use of effects on screen
but quite a bit of what we do is invisible, such as digital extras,
set extentions and environments,” explains Sargent, who dubs this
work digital production. “With large productions regularly carrying
2000 shots, facilities need scale (of artists and infrastructure)
even to win partial awards.”
Framestore
spans the Atlantic with 1000 people in London, New York, LA and
Montreal. Double Negative is even larger with around 4,500 employees
and offices in Mumbai, Singapore and Vancouver to keep productions
going around the clock.
Recent
demand for TV visual effects has risen with the renaissance in
episodic drama. “Drama producers value VFX because it suggests
production values of ambition and scale,” says Cohen, who led the
team at The Mill and then Milk to deliver movie-style VFX for Dr
Who. “Where TV VFX were once
considered cheap or shoddy, the dividing line between feature film
and TV is now very fine and Who
can claim to have embedded that in UK TV production culture.”
While
facilities like Milk started out specialising in TV before branching
into features, giants like Dneg have opened dedicated TV divisions.
It is working with Andy Serkis' Ealing-based performance capture
studio Imaginarium to bring high production value photoreal animated
characters - like Star Wars' Snoke (on which Imaginarium worked) - to
the small screen.
“The
aim is to fuse compelling performance capture with post-production to
create intriguing new stories and formats on a TV budget,” says CEO
Tony Orsten. “This is a set of skills that the UK as a country will
be able to offer this year.”
While
the handful of shops with overseas operations scoop their share of
summer blockbusters (Dneg worked on Captain America: Civil
War, Star Trek: Beyond and
Jason Bourne; Cinesite has
Independence Day: Resurgence and
X-Men: Apocalypse; Framestore
has Jungle Book: Origins, Geostorm and
Dr Strange and all
are creating Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them)
a vibrant clutch of mid-size outfits are also picking up business.
“The
larger facilities were only doing the big, punchy blockbusters but
the smaller films deserved as much care and we felt we could do that
without the big overheads,” says Ainsworth-Taylor who spied a gap
in the market for indie films and high-end TV.
Landing
VFX for Game of Thrones season
one instantly put BlueBolt on the map. It completed BBC flagship
drama War and Peace
and has Brad Pitt-produced Netflix satire War Machine,
Fox sci-fi Morgan and
Scott Free's eight-part drama Taboo
booked in.
Adam
Gascoyne and Tim Caplan launched UnionVFX as a duo in 2008. “Most
of the big houses concentrate on their relationships with the studios
but we felt that forming stronger bonds with directors would give us
a slightly different angle and a chance of winning work,” says
Gascoyne.
With
successive jobs for directors the calibre of Danny Boyle, James Marsh
and Kevin Macdonald the approach has paid off. Now staffing 50, the
outfit recreated 1940s New York including the interior of Carnegie
Hall for Stephen Frears' Florence Foster Jenkins
and has Bastille Day
and Bridget Jones' Baby
in the pipeline.
If
there was a question over the UK's ability to sustain the same level
of VFX work in the aftermath of Harry Potter, this has been roundly
answered. Extending film tax relief to 25% of UK spend and reducing
the minimum UK spend required to earn rebates for TV has cemented the
country's financial commitment to attracting the biggest shows.
Disney’s
pledge to produce six Star Wars
movies over the next 10 years looks set to follow Potter as a movie
franchise helping hot house yet more innovation.
“What
British VFX companies have done is to constanty push against the
envelope creatively and invest heavily in R&D in the confidence
that there is work out there,” says Hope. “In making that
considerable investment and building the know-how and infrastructure,
we are giving artists the tools to continually do groundbreaking
work.”
Special
Effects Supervision: Keeping it real
There
was a time when VFX threatened to consign special effects to history.
Chris Corbould pins that to 1995 when he was overseeing a tank chase
in St Petersburg for GoldenEye.
“There
was a feeling among VFX supervisors that everything would soon be
done digitally,” he recalls. “Instead, as the scope of films got
bigger, there was a knock-on effect. My crew on GoldenEye
was 40 but these days a typical size is 100.”
In
a medium saturated with digital effects, Corbould is prized for his
ability to stage, say, a 120 ft long rotating corridor in Inception,
an underground train crash in Skyfall or
flipping an 18 wheeled articulated lorry on its head down a narrow
Chicago street (The Dark Knight),
all on-camera and without the aid of a single post-production pixel.
It was he who suggested the real-life tank chase for Bond (he has
worked on fourteen Bonds from The Spy Who Loved Me
to Spectre) and his
team which placed explosions in the desert around the Millenium
Falcon in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He
is currently working on Star Wars Episode VIII.
“Certain
directors prefer to capture as much as possible on camera and then
manipulate the image in post,” says Corbould, whose career began at
the pre-dawn of computer graphics in 1978. “The script is the
blueprint, but then it's a question of how we can we make it better.
My job is to come up with ideas and then hire a great team of people
to make it happen.”
The
Corbould brand is shared among four brothers, each in the business
and pre-eminent in their field.
“Fortunately,
we never actually pitch for the same film because we tend to work on
different genres,” says Chris Corbould. “I love doing more
contemporary films, Neil likes the more gritty action and war
pictures (credits include Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk
Down, World War Z and Alien:
Covenant) and Paul fell into the
world of Marvel (Captain America: The First Avenger,
Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange).”
The
fourth sibling, Ian (who is second eldest after Chris), took on
Jungle Book: Origins
as his first sole supervision.
The
Corboulds are tasked with creating everything from atmospheric
effects like fog, rain, snowstorms and pyrotechnics like explosions
through to designing and operating mechanical hydraulics, robotics or
pneumatics for sequences such as the groundbreaking mesh of physical
with digital effects in Gravity.
“This
was a game-changer because even seasoned VFX supers in Hollywood
couldn't work out how it was done,” confides Neil Corbould, who won
his second Oscar (after Gladiator)
for the film. “Sometimes
animated objects just don't feel right and the audience won't be
fooled. If you really fire an object 100 metres, the speed,
trajectory and weight of impact will be real in a way that computer
artists can find hard to replicate.”
According
to Chris Corbould, it is the blend of CG with practical effects which
keeps this defiantly analogue craft in constant demand. “The
biggest advantage is in the actor's reactions,” he says. “You get
a very different reaction from actors against a 360-degree green
screen opposed to when live pyrotechnics are shooting off.”
The
family has trained dozens of British based crew in the art, some of
whom are already snapping at their heels. Steve Warner, mentored by
Neil Corbould, was a Bafta and Oscar nominee for The
Martian.
“There
are so many specialised courses now, from welding to driving
forklifts, modelling and CAD, there is without doubt talent in the
UK, primed here and now to take this work forward,” says Chris
Corbould.
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