My latest article has landed over at ILM.com as I sit down with ILM creative director David Vickery to discuss Jurassic World: Rebirth, the challenges of the film, living up to the weighty legacy of the 1993 original and the digital preferences of Gareth Edwards.
“The visual effects industry has grown in many ways,” says Vickery. “There’s a lot more trust placed in us than there used to be, even 10 years ago. Back then, visual effects were seen as something of a necessary evil – but now we find ourselves much more readily accepted as a department on set. Nowadays, other departments – whether it’s hair, makeup, costumes, special effects, stunts – rely on visual effects to guide how to film something because they know how vital it is that the visual effects work properly at the end of the process. They want to make sure what they’re doing is conducive to how we’re going to work, and it always used to be the other way around, so that’s been a refreshing change.”
On the surface, the art of visual effects may appear to be made up of equal parts skill, ingenuity, knowledge, and creativity, but the field also requires a healthy dose of collaboration, as Vickery explains.
“Over the years, I’ve found myself not trying to figure out how to do visual effects but rather figure out how not to do visual effects, and, as best I can, enable people on set to get what they need. You rely on the expertise of the crew. The camera operators and special effects technicians might have been in the industry for 30 years, and at ILM, we’ve got a bunch of talented artists that are generalists by nature, so that level of trust in visual effects has definitely grown.
“There’s a narrative in the press about how everything is done in-camera,” Vickery adds. “Well, yeah, everything is shot in camera because you can’t ‘shoot’ visual effects. What you’re trying to capture is as many practical things on set as you can because you can’t go back and get it in post-production.”
