SCREEN TIME
INVISIBLE LINK
Designing intricate visuals for massive titles, Cambridge’s Vine FX is on the rise. Miriam Balanescu gets an insider look W ith the explosion of TV in recent years – and the proliferation of streaming platforms – producers are That’s removing cars from period dramas or painting out modern technology. Set extensions are another huge part of the to that EFFECT FILM
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DUMB MONEY
work we do here – creating photoreal environments that transport the viewer to Bangkok, Paris, New York or even completely fictional places. “It can also be adding elements to elevate a shot. For The Touris t and The Serpent , we spent a lot of the time making sure everything we could see in the frame
A David and Goliath tale based on real events, telling the story of an everyday Joe who gamed Wall Street – and the ubelievable fallout that followed. Where to Watch: UK cinemas When: 23 September
having to make more with less. Since the early days of CGI and the often repulsive, ugly or downright laughable visual effects in films from the last half of the 20th century, we’ve thankfully come far. Now, it is near impossible to create films and shows without visual effects – and they appear in the least expected places. Vine FX is one of the leading visual effects studios in the UK, and is based in Cambridge. Under its belt, it has credits on shows like Netflix’s The Witcher or the BBC’s The Serpent and The Tourist . “When people think about visual effects, it’s almost always 3D CGI – robots, monsters, starships, futuristic buildings,” says Laura Usaite, managing director at Vine FX. “There’s a whole strand of work that’s referred to as ‘invisible VFX’.
was period-specific, removing anything that wasn’t. The Serpent was our first
You can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t
show completed during lockdown, so we needed to help out with scene transformations because the crew couldn’t travel anywhere at that time.” The process is painstaking, taking out individual elements, then ‘compositing’ – meaning layering elements on top of a shot “and blending them together so you can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t.” “It takes a lot of time,” says Laura. “The black hole in Interstellar took 100 hours to render just one frame. A second of film is made up of 24 frames. So, 2,400 hours of computing time went into every second of that film. Fortunately, we share the computing burden across multiple machines in render farms – rooms full of computers that can be found in most studios and in the cloud. If we didn’t have those, even the simplest of effects wouldn’t be achievable at scale.” But things are speeding up – rapidly. “The tools we use add capabilities almost every quarter, and the AI revolution is pushing that faster,” explains Laura. “It’s exciting, but we need to be careful about how we use these new technologies. The industry is rushing to figure out how AI fits into the landscape.”
In this twisty western and camp classic, Pedro Almodóvar’s two protagonists are friends and former gunmen separated for 25 years whose paths cross once again. Where to Watch: UK cinemas When: 25 September STRANGE WAY OF LIFE
Cristian Mungiu turns his lens to rifts in a Transylvanian village. When out-of-towners are hired at a local factory, tensions spill over. Where to Watch: UK cinemas When: 21 September R.M.N.
OUT OF THIS WORLD Vine FX’s work on series three of War of the Worlds encompassed hundreds of shots, involving creature animation and environment design
20 SEPTEMBER 2023 CAMBSEDITION.CO.UK
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