- Squires cites the skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts as one of his all-time favorite effects sequences.
Read part one of this interview.
How many movies does a typical visual effects artist work on in a year?
If I’m [designing] a building in New York that’s very reflective—you know, it has windows all down the side—it’s very easy to make it look “perfect” with computer graphics, meaning the windows come out as one flat surface. But if you look at a real building, you’ll see that every window is slightly offset, and there’s some distortion. The reflections aren’t perfectly aligned; they’re all a little bit out. Those little imperfections are what I and a lot of other artists strive for. Like the effects team that [created] the tiger in Life of Pi—they photographed a lot of tigers to get their look and motions.
- Life of Pi
There’s a particular aesthetic to stop-motion, and sometimes that’s a desired look. Same with hand-drawn animation. When you see those, you’re not thinking, “That’s such a realistic thing.” You’re thinking, “That’s an interesting thing.” At one time, of course, stop-motion and the like did look realistic to viewers, because those were the most realistic effects out there.
A lot of people these days like to say that effects people are ruining movies, but it’s important to understand that we work for the directors, just like production designers. We’re not writing or directing these movies—it’s not our fault if they’re bad. Another thing to understand is that we visual effects artists generally strive for photorealistic imagery, but that can run counter to what the director wants. Take the case of fast-moving, large creatures. A large creature requires a few steps to ramp up to a certain speed—an elephant, you know, can’t just start running at 60 miles per hour. But frequently directors tell us make it faster, make it faster, make it faster. So, these big, heavy things end up looking like they don’t have any weight to them.
