My working process is simple enough. A movie will come to the company with a script. Together with my visual effects supervisor, we have a meeting where we break down the script into storyboards and give them advice on how they should approach certain sequences. The main issues are whether it should be shot as miniatures, as live action elements, or if there needs to be CG [computer-generated] work in there too, and how we can do it.
A lot of our work is with computer-driven motion-control cameras. It’s a way of replicating a camera move over and over again. At its most basic, in a film such as Babe, you want to shoot a lot of animals together in one scene, so you work out your camera move, put one animal in, shoot it, then swap it for another. You replicate that process until you’ve built up that entire scene. A lot of the rest involves filming miniatures and model work for scenes that can’t be realised on set or on computer.
Most of what we do happens in front of the camera and not in post production on computer. I have worked on the digital side of effects in the past, but you can’t beat what we do here. I believe that there’s nothing better for the realism of an effect than to build an environment and have it physically in front of the camera. Too many CG effects can make the film feel a bit flat, and the paying public can tell.
We work with a lot of directors who think that way too. Someone like Tim Burton is really great. He wants to approach a film and uses CG work only if it’s right. Otherwise he wants to see sets around him, and he wants a practical environment for his actors to relate to.
I started in the business as a runner at a post-production house in Soho. I left school, in West London, before doing my A levels and first worked as a photographer’s assistant, so I knew a bit about the technical side of cameras. I went from running to operating and soon joined a company called the Mill. The effects they did there won an Oscar for Gladiator. That film, for me, is the perfect special-effects movie because you don’t think about it as an effects film. All you think about is the story. And that’s what this business is all about, serving the story. Gladiator is the opposite of a film such as The Day After Tomorrow, which is just a visualeffects feast that doesn’t quite work.
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My advice to people who want to get into the effects business is to know exactly what you want to do. Too many people just want to get into film without knowing where they should go. I recently got a letter and CV from someone wanting to do hair and make-up, which isn’t much use in a visual-effects house.
Although CG technology rolls on - and you can’t knock it for its advances - the best films that I’ve worked on are the ones, such as Moulin Rouge and Black Hawk Down, in which the film-makers have used every technique at their disposal to achieve the desired results. In the crash sequence in Black Hawk Down we used miniature work, CG and live action all in the one scene. It was the same for some of the scenes in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Sweeney Todd.
What we do here has a noble history that goes back to the days of Jason and the Argonauts and [the special-effects legend] Ray Harryhausen. The old boys we work with have been doing it for years, and they have a lot of knowledge about how to get it just right in front of the camera so that it’s perfect. Whereas with a lot of the younger guys today, the mentality is: “Hurry up, time is money, let’s just do it and hope we can fix it in post-production.” But if you plan it and shoot it right, you don’t have to go down that avenue. A lot of these guys are blown away when they walk around our miniatures and our effects environments, because they’re only used to seeing things on computers in a darkened room, with a hundred other people sitting around them. But to touch and feel something in front of you is an entirely different thing.
The movie business moves in peaks and troughs and right now on both sides of the effects business it’s getting harder and harder. The clients want us to squeeze out more and more shots in a shorter amount of time. The other big thing that’s happening now is the transition to hi-def digital cameras. The key question is when are these new cameras finally going to supersede film cameras and how will that affect the feature film business as a whole.
I find it hard to go to the movies, especially if they’re big effects blockbusters, and just sit back and enjoy them. I find that straight away, when you get into the fantasy sequence, things start jumping out at me. I look at them and I think: “We could have done that better!” You always end up pulling things apart.