As visual effects supervisor my approach to VFX has mostly been in service of in-house productions at BITWAVE MEDIA and my primary task was to investigate ways to integrate vfx into our production process. From the onset I’ve always believed that modern film making is essentially digital film making, so I spent a lot of time trying to find ways to make this digital process of filmmaking affordable in a local industry where the average budget for a film is considered “no budget” by global standards.
Digital film making for me isn’t just grandiose imagery and blockbuster effects. It is also about having maximum control over the final image, whether it’s cleaning up dolly tracks, a visible light stand, mic or audio receiver in a shot, stabilizing shaky footage, augmenting a set with props production can’t afford or altering footage to reflect a particular period or location. The digital process is something I consider an integral part of visual story telling in this age and with the widespread availability of desktop editing and animation tools and the rapid advancements in graphic processing hardware I saw VFX as a means of doing things in local movies that would normally be out of our reach
Over the years I’ve gained unique insight into the difficulties that accompany digital production in developing countries and I’ve formulated workarounds to help circumvent what would otherwise be expensive and complicated processes to achieve visual fidelity.
In the area of rendering for example, I’ve looked at how much we could improve our rendering speed while keeping cost considerably low by using GPU based renderers, so I made the move to adopt a GPU-centric workflow at a time when general opinion was that GPUs were ok for architectural visualization but not for high end visual effects work. I chose to use the tech and make it work for us. I found workarounds for the limitations and I moved my entire CG rendering workflow to the GPU. This cut down render time drastically. I’ve witnessed as much as 10x speed improvement on some shots and of course time is money, such an improvement was invaluable to the workflow.
My visual effects workflow is robust and flexible, capable of accommodating a wide variety of project types, with the potential to deliver across multiple mediums and formats. Add to that the ability to adapt to any kind of production schedule and collaborate across multiple platforms and timezones, my visual effects pipeline is more than capable