FEATURE | WOMEN I N VFX
PATRICIA LLAGUNO Job title: compositing supervisor
“At the end of the Gipsy Danger v Otachi fight, Gipsy Danger falls back into Earth’s atmosphere and is met by Idris Elba’s character alongside crowds of workers cheering – but they didn’t have workers when they shot it. So, I directed a bunch of green screen shoots with the whole ILM crew standing in as extras!” She adds: “The fight was interesting to work on, because it was all CG. I wasn’t constrained to making it fit with our plates. It was also a lot of fun, because Guillermo del Toro is really into colour. He would constantly tell me to make it more Mexican, and what he meant by that was more saturated. I put a pretty palette into that sequence, where it’s cool moonlight on one side and warm sunset on the other. If you watch it, one side of the lighting is pink, the other blue, and I just carried that through all the way into space and all the way back down to earth. It gives it a look different to other space films – it’s more fantasy.” in smaller companies with less complex pipelines, as it gives you the chance to move around different roles while you explore each department. It gives you a lot more freedom to decide what is the best fit for your talents and interests, and you learn much faster. When you have taken a couple of projects in a specific area – be it modelling, animation, FX, lighting or compositing – it’s worth moving to a bigger studio and learning all that goes with bigger scale projects.” actors swim through it and not be wet. “It took a few iterations, but it was fascinating work that incorporated complex grading, CG integration and optical effects.” She adds: “My advice is to start out
Lindy DeQuattro started interning while she was still studying at film school. She worked for free on a title called Cyber Bandits , which gave her the class credit and experience she needed to land a paid internship with the Sony High Definition Centre, where she got to animate and composite the scorpion in Mortal Kombat . “By the time I graduated, I had four productions behind me that I could put on my show reel and that gave me the boost to get my first full-time job. It’s really important for people who are in school to get experience in any way they can, because, whether it’s a paid or unpaid internship, nobody wants to hire somebody who’s never done anything.” DeQuattro has worked on high-profile productions such as The Great Gatsby and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince , but she is best known for her work on the award-winning Pacific Rim , where she had to do a little more than what was in her remit. the job creatively and technically challenging. It was great fun to be able to contribute to imagined universes and run with quite open visual briefs for Guardians and Thor , and to temper the anarchic fantasy of the underwater sequence in Mary Poppins Returns with the delicacy and gentleness befitting a classic musical. I also loved being able to bring some seamless and photoreal images to Downton Abbey and rise to the challenge of the beautiful 6K photography that had been shot for those plates.” She says the underwater sequence was the most challenging to work on, because it required striking the right balance between a believable underwater environment and the magical elements in it, as well as having LINDY DEQUATTRO Job title: VFX supervisor
Patricia Llaguno always aspired to work in film and did some freelance camera work after graduating from film school before deciding to give VFX a try. “I could hardly use a computer then, but I loved cameras, painting, maths and photography so I gave it a go. I started as a runner at Mill Film nearly 20 years ago and moved through to data, editorial and paint/ roto before I started compositing.” Over the last three years, Patricia Llaguno has worked on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 , Thor: Ragnarok , Mary Poppins Returns , Pokémon Detective Pikachu and Downton Abbey . “I always enjoy doing a wide variety of work, servicing different narratives and aesthetic briefs, as it keeps
44 DEF I N I T ION | MARCH 2020
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