UK in Focus - page 20

Spotlight
Special Effects
That the UK is regarded as an industry leader in the world of special effects, both visual and practical,
is testament to the skill of the sector’s craftspeople.
Adrian Pennington
goes behind the scenes.
Visual
Pioneers
Double Negative and Milk worked on Academy Award winner Ex Machina
I
n 2016, and for the first time, UK expertise
dominated the Academy Award nominations
for visual effects. Cinesite (
The Revenant
) and
Moving Picture Company (MPC) with
Framestore (
The Martian
) — assisted by The
Senate with additional effects by Atomic Arts
and Milk — were both nominated, as was
Star
Wars: The Force Awakens
, which was supervised
by UK artists stationed at ILM London and
included the practical-effects prowess of Chris
Corbould [see sidebar]. The incredible effects
of winning picture
Ex Machina
— which
included transforming Alicia Vikander into an
android with visible moving parts —were han-
dled by Double Negative (Dneg) and Milk.
This is far from a fluke, with home-grown
vendors having won six Academy Awards (from
10 nominations) in the last 11 years.The Oscar
trail blazed by Framestore on
The Golden Com-
pass
(2008) continued with lead VFX responsi-
bility by Dneg for Christopher Nolan’s
Inception
(2011),
Life of Pi
(2013, Moving Picture Com-
pany),
Gravity
(2014, Framestore) and
Interstel-
lar
(2015, Dneg), culminating — at the time of
writing—in the 2016 win for Dneg’s
ExMachina
.
“One of the benefits of the UK is that we are
collectively very integrated,” says William Sar-
gent, 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 cohe-
sive unit. Quite simply, studio executives, direc-
tors and DoPs like working here.”
It was London’s status as a European centre
for commercial production in the early 1990s
that incubated the first visual-effects busi-
nesses, which then 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 Cine-
site MD Antony Hunt. “Focusing on innovation
and creative excellence, on very high-end tech-
nical accomplishment and, importantly, on
businesses that were well managed and finan-
cially responsible.”
The Mill’s VFX Oscar win in 2001 for
Gladia-
tor
signalled the UK’s arrival on the interna-
tional scene, but the moment that truly
reshaped the landscape was the decision by
Warner Bros. to produce the
Harry Potter
fran-
chise on UK shores, so underpinning the indus-
try and showcasing the fantastic abilities of UK
artists to Hollywood and beyond.
“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.
Will Cohen, Milk CEO, agrees. “What was a
cottage industry at the start of
Harry Potter
was
fully grown up a decade later,” he says.
The impetus snowballed with the introduc-
tion of tax breaks in 2007, which further incen-
tivise overseas producers to place more of their
production budget in the UK. In 2015, some
18
1...,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19 21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,...84
Powered by FlippingBook