Lucasfilm chat with Bournemouth based Layout Artist Josh Chappell about his day-to-day responsibilities and tasks working at ILM London, a role he has long coveted.
ILM: To begin, could you tell us your role and summarize your day-to-day responsibilities?
JC: I am a layout artist at Industrial Light & Magic’s (ILM) London studio, and right now I’m working on television projects. Not many people know about layout, but it’s sort of the foundation for a lot of visual effects. It’s one of the few departments that touches every shot in a particular sequence, so you get a lot of variety.
There are usually two types of layout, one that is more technical, and the other more creative. On the technical side, you can create match-moves, build sets, do object-tracking, rotoanim, and stuff like that. It involves building camera moves within a computer-generated set. Object-tracking involves attaching elements to things in the footage, like a glowing lightsaber in Star Wars. There’s not much gray area on that side. It’s either right or wrong, but it’s fun to touch many of the shots. On the creative side, we get to create shots directly from storyboards or shot lists. We’re involved in the creation and development of the actual shots. We get to play around and try things. Sometimes you even do something wrong and they like it!
Layout is the preparation work that serves as the foundation for much of the visual effects work, which happens on top of it. It’s right at the start of the pipeline. We have to be quite thorough, because if anything is incorrect or broken, it can cause problems later on. Layout is a good pathway to becoming a generalist artist, because you learn so much from almost every single department. It’s quite nice to have that broad exposure, and there’s a lot of problem-solving and puzzles involved. It’s a good place for people who like that sort of thing!