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Grantland writer Kevin Lincoln summed up “Ex Machina” beautifully when he wrote, “It’s a story about artificial intelligence, not-artificial intelligence, trust, love, parenthood, sincerity, watching Oscar Isaac exercise, the ethics of surveillance, the future of the human race, and beer.” For us at Film Independent, the film—with its incredibly alluring fembot in the leading role—is also a fantastic opportunity to explore the magical world of VFX, and the role of a VFX supervisor.
Alex Garland is a very visually literate director. He can also draw very well, which is incredibly useful. It did speed up the process because he and I could sit down with print outs and the current state of the design and a bunch of Sharpies and a stack of paper and just sketch and come up with ideas and revisions of where we could go in the next round of illustrations or build into the actual model. It’s pretty normal for some sort of concept art to exist before a visual effects company joins the show. Simply because generally concept artists produce something to pitch the project to the studio, so something will generally exist before the thing gets greenlit in the first place. It’s pretty unusual someone will come to you with nothing. That’s not a problem, though, because we would generally come to generate our own concept art anyway, because we will generate art with the mindset of how we’re actually going to achieve it, considering the realities of VFX. So it’s a slightly more informed piece of concept art. But either approach can work. I think the key thing for all parties to remember is that it’s a collaboration. So you will often try a whole bunch of ideas that don’t work, and there’s an idea that people feel will be the most promising and you’ll push that and you’ll go off on a tangent. It is a process and it takes some time to get to the place that you need to be. And I think the potential pitfall is thinking, ‘Okay, here’s the brief. Just do it right now.’ That tends not to produce a great result because everybody needs to think about it and react to things. And over time it comes together.
Can you give an example of how that collaborative process played out in “Ex Machina”?
Is there anything else you can share that would be helpful for a filmmaker working with a VFX company for the first time?
READ MORE: Review: Alex Garland’s ‘Ex Machina’ Delivers a Modern Day Twist on Frankenstein
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