The Supervisor, VFX Supe, or many other more colloquial names is ostensibly the person in charge of the creative vision and execution of all the Visual Effects associated with a specific project.
The role changes a great deal depending on the projects format, there are Supervisors in Film, TV, Gaming, Interactive, Virtual and while they are the tip of the creative spear, the work differs from Film to Gaming is significant ways.
There are also a number of scales of Supervisors. Production Super, or Overall Super tend to be independent and work solely for a project and discreetly with the creative vision for the project, often with a Director or Showrunner. While a Vendor, or Digital Supervisor leads a team of artists and disciplines within a VFX Company. From 1000s of artists to small teams of a dozen or smaller.
The experience and skills required to do both Production and Vendor are differently focused. The Vendor Supervisor will often be crucial in bringing all the tricks of photographic visual effects to bear on vfx shots within a specific infrastructure built by the company, using the tools to hand.
The Production Supervisor works much more closely with the prep and shoot teams, building a picture of the project in a way that can be easily translated between Visual Effects and the rest of the production apparatus. They are responsible for brief interpretation, the overall creative vision and the qualitative execution and balance of visual effects.
The Production Supervisor is often overseeing multiple Vendor Supervisors with multiple companies working on a single project to achieve the work on schedule and within budget.
THE VFX SUPERVISOR
Not Quite the Top of the Tree
This role often sits side by side with the VFX Supervisor, taking on all the logistical, financial and other areas of the visual effects process to support and enable the creative part of VFX to develop un-hindered. But, they are also the voice of reason, ensuring that while the creatives have fun, creating worlds, destroying worlds, that they do so within the means of any given project.
Not an easy balancing act.
The Producer role also manages and oversees all of the Production portions of the visual effects organization, which can be dozens of departments and a huge scale of roles from Production Mangers, coordinators, PA's and other crew within the production.
They will often be a link-point with the financial controllers and executives that manage and oversee the entire show. The VFX Producers skill in compiling all the relevant information regarding the state of the visual effects, and communicating it's needs, it's ability to help and it's goals within the show is a challenge which shifts on every project depending on the nature and make-up of those overseeing.
VFX Producers can often be seen as the wet-blankets, stifling the artists in the camp, but this is far from true and the finest Producers are the essential reason a project can be successful since they will find the balance and maintain momentum with dropping anything that can't be fixed later.
THE VFX PRODUCERS
Managing Artistic Chaos
Animation has been an integral component of visual effects from the very beginning, and continues to diversify and specialise as demands grow.
The craft started as a heavily manual process, animating by hand using handdrawn materials onto filmic cells, and not just for characters, but clouds, vehicles and anything that needed to move and could not be achieved as a real thing.
Contemporary 2D and 3D animators use very different tools, but all follow the skills needed to make anything move in an engaging and realistic way. Animators not only create motion of creatures, cowboys, spaceships or table lamps from the ground up, but also adjust and enhance captured animation from motion capture sources or simulated subjects, often taking over and enhancing a moment or correcting perceived physics within an animated image.
Animators work within teams and in isolation, and often contribute specific areas of animation to an overall picture, or even fill the gaps left behind the bigger picture animators.
The tru animator can take an object that doesn't appear to be moving correctly and bring a sense of life, physics, emotion or gravity to an object outside of the truly physical constraints placed on real things, and make It more real.
THE ANIMATOR
Magical Motionographers
The Compositor is usually the last artist to touch a visual effects shot.
They combine all of the elements supplied both by other visual effects artists and photography shot outside of visual effects, as well as elements created by themselves.
The art of making a wide variety of components, come together as a piece of photography is a highly prized and well paid discipline.
The main software tool for most Compositors is Nuke, although, Fusion, After Effects, Flame, and other tools contribute to the skillset of the Compositor both at home and within larger organisations.
They are sometimes in charge of a team, but will likely work under or with a VFX Supervisor. In larger organisations they work alongside the CG, FX, Animators, and prep teams as well as liaising with the production members to ensure stuff get's done on time.
Their work is subject to HoD approval, or the VFX Supervisors approval.
Often, they are credited under the general banner of Digital Artists, but they stand separate from other members as being the last in line to touch a visual effects shot.
THE COMPOSITOR
The Last Artist in the Line
If there is one discipline within visual effects that is best described as a magic box process, FX is it. The intuitive and talented artists that specialise in FX can create some of the most indescribable visuals while using some of the most un-intuitive software made by anyone.
FX refers to most of the natural fluid elements, such as water, smoke and fire. And encompasses anything that relies setting initial conditions and parameters, running a simulation and then manipulating or interupting those conditions to create a specific result, whether it be real, magical or something in-between.
The FX crew work separately until ready to pass on the result to teams that will add light, shade, texture and context to the creations. They tend to be very much in 4-dimenions, and liaise with the 3d disciplines to achieve the results.
It is one of the younger disciples in visual effects, but arguably stays as complex as ever as demands increase and software evolves. They also tend to be the hardest to predict results from since a small change to something complex can make the next step take an in-ordinate amount of time.
But the results……..wow!
FX WIZARD
Harnessing Natures Motion
Matte Painting has been a part of film making and visual effects since the very early 1900's, using paint on glass which was placed in front of a camera and filmed in conjunction with other elements.
Often referred to as DMP now, Digital Matte Painting, and most often using digital tools to create worlds, landscape, places and objects that make up a final composite put together by the Compositor. Many paintings can be split into layers to deceive the eye with parallax perspective as well as be project onto three dimensional shapes and create true perspectives with painting and geometry.
The Painter will often work in isolation and their finished art becomes an essential component in a finished visual effects shot. Very rarely does a Matte Painting survive without the addition of motion or live action elements.
The painter also plays an integral part in the conceptualization of visual effect, often producing many types of paintings called concepts, which allows creative to explore ideas in a truly visual medium and interpreted thru the big picture artist.
This discipline is one of the most at risk from todays rapid rise of AI generative tools, but one hopes the skills continue unabated just as painting on canvas has weathered the digital tsunami of tools over artists.
THE PAINTER
Blank Page Specialists
These folks are often overlooked in their contribution to a realistic and dramatic look in finished visual effects. In shooting things for real, the lighting Gaffer and Director of Photography collaborate to light scenes, people and things in ways that evoke a visual in line with the overall aesthetic vision of the project.
The Lighter has to absorb all of that work, months after the fact, and bring to bear digital versions of lighting to match as exactly as possible the analogue techniques used, from colour temperatures, illumination types, placement and intensities, all on top of trying to make it feel real.
On some projects they receive a considerable amount of reference and information, often captured by the Wranglers and Supervisors which will always help, but the art of lighting a computer generated object exactly like real life is subject to many variables often very subtle and hard to identify until placed next to real photography. Just matching placement and type exactly is never the final result, then relying on the eye of the Lighter to adjust.
The lighter is often working in parallel to other 3d disciplines so the goal posts often move, literally out of the spot light! But a good team not only knows how to help, enable and enhance the contribution a talented lighter can bring to a scene, but can also incorporate them in a way to get amazing results.
THE LIGHTER
Illuminating the Scene
During the shooting of any project be it commercial, tv, film or anything requiring the photographing of real people, places and action and having visual effects help finish the project, needs a wrangler on the floor, on location, at the point of photographic capture.
They are on set every day, strapped up with technical equipment and digital measuring and survey tools to record everything on set. While the camera records picture, the Wrangler records everything the camera doesn't see. The learning curve and pace at which Wranglers need to work can be intense and they have to integrate into a complex crew of many non-visual effects disciplines to ensure all the information is gathered.
They will often work as a team, with a Supervisor overseeing the team. They can also specialise in particular areas of recording, such as witness or drama cameras, HDRi capture, set surveys and set recording.
They have a raft of gear to look after, use and manage from multi thousands of pound cameras and lenses, to specialised photographic heads and survey equipment down to memory cards, ipads, tripods, chrome balls and tape measures!
Wranglers work period on any given project can be short, a matter of weeks, the length of a shoot, but the hours are long and brutal since not only do they need to shadow and gather info while everyone is working and shooting, they then need to hand off, organise and sometimes process that info to onto other vfx team members or companies.
Wranglers life is not for the faint-hearted, but no process replaces having a Wranglers eyes on location.
THE WRANGLER
Capturing a Window in Time
Often referred to as prep as well as clean-up, and rotoscoping to use the full term.
This contribution to a finished visual effects shot is just as essential as any other component, but is often seen as the bottom of the vfx shot chain, not only because it is regularly the very starting point in many visual effect shots, but they also often get the smallest pay-check.
This job, though, for many years was seen as an entry level to advancing up into compositing or other 2-dimension disciplines, and many of the most self contained compositors keep their roto skills sharp and practise it often. However, with the advent of roto-prep specialist companies, in labour cheap countries that changed for good, and finding a role as a Roto artist is hard in labour expensive regions. It's cheaper to send it to roto-shop-101.
The art of isolating portions of a photographed image to insert new things in-between, or around was a frame-by frame affair for a long time. But software has improved and developed to allow experienced artist to keyframe and only intervene when the software doesn't follow an edge.
The techniques burgeoned during the stereo movie era, when the only way to acomplish stereo photography in post was to rotoscope out all the layers of any given image to create a 3-dimensional effect. The benefitted the industry with vast leaps forwards with roto tool-sets.
The newly formed advent of AI, also, looks to disrupt this area of visual effects yet again with tools that can "automatically" separate many things, and various levels of fidelity in such a way that the number of people required to fully rotoscope a shot is significantly reduced.
A dying art but still an essential part of the visual effects process.
ROTOSCOPER
Separating the Layers
Running is not an actual job description, but in some eras and areas, sprinting across a studio film lot with cases of tape or film to make the last bath, or a transmission time, was very much part of the role….not so much these days, wires do that kind of running for us.
The runner role is seen as an entry point into many aspects of visual effects production not just because it can give them access to places others don’t see, but can give them a window into many aspects of the process.
They will organise the fuel, drink and many needs to help others make their day, or achieve a result that would just not be possible without the help of the Runners holding up those tasks. But they will also be part of the production infrastructure, contributing to many logistical, organizational and coordinating tasks and seeing how all of those roles integrate.
The best runners know everyone, and know how everything links together, and they often become the fine senior crew members since they've been a the visual effects production coal face.
Some runners who operate within companies can get desk time, or edit time, or many other creative chances in the off hours and while equipment lies un-manned. Self training can be an integral part of the Running process and allows Runner to eye-up just where they want to move onto next, a chance many disciplines never get.
THE RUNNERS
Moving the Machine
MORE COMING SOON
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