FEATURE | WOMEN I N VFX
LAURA USAITE Job title: head of production
Usaite has also worked on Deadwater Fell , Beecham House , Black Mirror , The Widow and Summer of Rockets . This year, Vine FX was the sole vendor on Canal+ and Fox Networks’ eight-part drama, War of the Worlds , which is scheduled for release in the UK on 6 March. She worked as a VFX producer on the project and her team were able to deliver more than 500 shots for the TV series. She adds: “Planning and communication are key elements of this role, but sometimes you have to prepare for unexpected. The best result is made by a team effort and enjoyment.”
Laura Usaite joined Vine FX in Cambridge as an Erasmus student over two years ago. She came from a film production background, having studied it at university in Lithuania. “The first project I worked on was as VFX coordinator on Patrick Melrose . It was such a fantastic experience, because although learning new skills can be challenging, it’s also fun. I was grateful to be surrounded by talented people who helped me evolve – and I still am! If you don’t know something, don’t be afraid to ask. I also love living in Cambridge – it’s a vibrant city that provides the perfect balance between having a personal life and work.”
ABOVE Laura Smith worked on the CGI for the anthropomorphic horses included in a promo of ITV’s coverage of the Grand National
LAURA SMITH Job title: flame artist
horses talk with character and humour. The edit was key to this; choosing takes where the horses’ own actions lent themselves to the script. Once the plates were tracked, and the multiple tracking markers cleaned up from the horses faces, we took the new talking muzzles created by our CG team and combined them with our shot plates. “With whiskers, fur and the flexible nature of a horse’s mouth, this was quite a complex task. Thankfully, there are many fabulous tools within Flame to help with this. A helpful technique was using the motion vector tracking to take sections of the real horses’ muzzles and retracking them back to have to excel. If you’re a runner making tea, make it the best tea and seek opportunities to assist those around you. As a female artist in the industry, you will be in a minority, but this is starting to change. You may face unconscious bias frommen and women: that the complex technicalities of VFX are better understood by men. Nonsense, of course, but all one can do is demonstrate this is not the case. (Over and over and over again!)” Whatever your role, you have to excel. If you’re a runner making tea, make it the best tea and seek opportunities to assist those around you the CG animated muzzles to achieve a blend between the two. Then it was just a matter of adding whiskers, steamy horse breath and the dusty atmosphere of the stable.” She advice is: “Whatever your role, you
Laura Smith started out as a runner at SVC Television and was promoted to junior artist a year later. “I knew where I wanted to be; in the big shiny suite with (what was then) a £500,000 computer. The route was to go via the machine room; assisting the editors, making tape copies and playing out masters. I was the only girl in a team of 12 and it was assumed – I don’t know why – that girls would work on reception first, but I made it clear that was not the path I wanted. When I was asked to help on reception, I sat with a big, fat video science manual.” Smith is now a flame artist at Coffee & TV and has worked on a number of projects for ITV, as well for Clé de Peau, Tanqueray, E.ON and Versace. Her favourite job was a promo for ITV’s coverage of the Grand National. “We worked alongside our CG team to create a stable of talking racehorses playing a game of ‘What am I?’ With a limited time frame, we had to find a way to make the
46 DEF I N I T ION | MARCH 2020
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